'Non piangere.' Don't cry. These are the opening words of Anna Banti's novel Artemisia. Who is talking? And when? The first-person voice - that of the author - writes 'this August day', omitting both the date and the year, but these are not hard to fill in: 4 August 1944. The Nazi occupation of Florence, following the collapse of the Mussolini Government, has taken its appalling, final turn. At four o'clock that morning, the Germans, who had begun evacuating the city, detonated the mines they had set along the Arno, managing to blow up all the venerable bridges except the Ponte Vecchio and to wreck many houses on or near the river, among them the house on the Borgo San Jacopo where Banti lived, under the ruins of which lay the manuscript of her new novel, nearly completed, about Artemisia Gentileschi.

LRB 25 September 2003 | PDF Download