Fantasy, science fiction, horror… after decades spent elbowing their way into bookstores and onto both the small and big screen, we can finally say that the literatures of the fantastic are in excellent health. Let’s celebrate: geek culture has come out of the ghetto and become mainstream, mainly because people realized it moves a lot of money.
The fantastic is watched, played. It is even read, a fact consistently met with surprise by those who compile Italian reading statistics (and by cultural journalism).
However, success has not fallen evenly across the genres of non-mimetic fiction: as in the past, different sensibilities establish the fortune of one theme or another, and consequently the growth of the genre that most easily collects and represents those impulses.
The common impression is that this is the time of fantasy.
This does not mean that science fiction, horror, or weird stories are no longer published or read: but it is fantasy that dominates the new releases, the bestseller lists. It’s its subgenres that are the most talked about. A further clue to fantasy’s dominance over the other speculative genres is the attribution to it of dystopian or science-fictional titles.
The Italian experience
Having clarified that fantasy is doing extraordinarily well, one wonders who is benefiting from this golden age. If books are selling, someone is publishing them; and upstream, someone is writing them (at least until Artificial Intelligence takes the matter into its own hands, a future not so long off).
So, who is writing what is being published in Italy, under the voracious label of fantasy?
The Italian Fantasy Writing Association Dracones recently published a reworking of AIE Observatory data for 2023 dedicated to the fantastic in Italy, highlighting a structural problem. Of the €47.3 million that make up the fantastic’s market share, only €3.3 million (7%) comes from titles originally written in Italian. A remarkably low percentage, especially compared to that of all other narrative genres (whose markets are divided more or less equally between local production and translations from abroad). This is even more significant if we consider that the global number of fantasy publications has grown significantly in recent years, while this tiny percentage of Italian works has essentially remained the same.
Could it be that in Italy we know how to write just about everything – except the fantastic?
This hypothesis is, of course, absurd. And not only because Italy has produced works of enormous prestige that fully belong to speculative fiction – there’s no need to invoke Italo Calvino, Primo Levi or Tomasi di Lampedusa to prove that Italians can write fantastic literature. Rather, the cause is to be found in the numbness caused by decades of cultural colonialism.
It’s about time we shake it off.
A renewed interest in Italian fantasy, driven by a spirit of vindication, encompasses dedicated reading groups, new publishing houses, festivals, and associations.
It’s the outcome of years of reflection. Its variety reflects a fragmented discourse, carried out in private spaces or by small groups. Genuine laboratories of experimentation, committed to exploring alternative paths to bridge the gap between fantasy and other literary genres, and between Italian fantasy and its global counterpart.
Defining Italian fantasy fiction
In such a vibrant environment, my role as an author and a literary critic becomes that of studying the phenomenon and identifying its main elements—in short, putting some order into it. An undertaking as exciting as it is complex, given that Italian fantasy production has so far been completely ignored by academia.
Finding myself in the fortunate position of being able to draw a line, I can sketch out an operational definition of what Italian fantasy is (what fantasy itself is, we have addressed at length in the first chapters of “Anatomia del Fantasy: Leggere e scrivere fantasy in modo critico”, published by Lumien).
Italian fantasy is fantasy conceived and written in the Italian language.
It may seem obvious, but writing in Italian is not an obligatory choice: witness the Italian writers who have chosen not to do so, like Francesco Dimitri and Giovanni De Feo.
Nor is it a given: second-generation or immigrant authors know this well, as do those who learned Italian and then chose it among several alternatives as the language to entrust their thoughts to.
It is not a choice bound to geographical borders, as shown by our neighbors in Switzerland, or the voices of thousands of Italians living abroad who spend their days immersed in a foreign language yet return to Italian when writing their stories.
The language we write in defines us
Writing fantasy in Italian is a decision, more or less conscious, more or less emotional. Even before the first word is set on the page, it helps define a frame of reference.
Choosing to write in one language rather than another is not a neutral act: not only because it determines the future of the text (who will publish it, where it will be displayed, which audience will hold it in their hands…), but because language carries within it its own intrinsic cultural baggage. From the subtlety of untranslatable terms, to the specificity of local customs; from the obscure name of a folkloric creature to a dialect word we are convinced is “true Italian.”
The allure of Italy is not a superficial patina applied for atmosphere («Santa Mozzarella!» exclaims the co-protagonist of Pixar’s Luca, between a plate of pesto pasta and a Vespa ride. And so no-one ever in reality). It is something that filters through our fingers as we tap on the keyboard, in the effort to find the word that sounds right.
Italian fantasy and Med fantasy
I can imagine what you’re thinking: Cool, but what about the setting?
Wouldn’t it be more correct to define as Italian the fantasy set in Italy?
A legitimate objection, one supported by the choices of some publishing houses. However, when asked to define Italian fantasy, I chose (let’s admit, arbitrarily, though for reasons explained above) an inclusive strategy. Moreover, there are drawbacks to defining Italian fantasy solely as a function of where the story is set.
The first problem is that such a definition would be at least partly redundant: Med Fantasy (or Mediterranean Fantasy) has already existed for over forty years, incorporating precisely those stories set in the basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Stories not limited to the Italian peninsula, of course, but which often include it, sometimes at its center, by virtue of its geographical position.
Personally, I find it reductive to consider Italian fantasy a mere offshoot of Med Fantasy, as if it had organically developed from it—more a presumption than a fact. Indeed, very few contemporary writers have actually read Giuseppe Pederiali or Gianluigi Zuddas, the forefathers of Med Fantasy.
Secondly, linking the adjective “Italian” to the geographical setting of the stories would exclude all works set not only in other nations but also in Secondary Worlds with no relation to ours. The variety of subgenres would thus suffer.
Where are we going from here?
What Italian fantasy is might actually already be an outdated question.
The audience decided long ago, creating its own practical definition. This makes it possible to select new books to read and recommend: gathered under the hashtag #fantasyitaliano we therefore find titles differing in tone, style, and subgenre. They are first and foremost united by not being translations, and only as a second stage by the Italianness of the name on the cover (since a taste for english-sounding pseudonyms persists).
No, I suspect the near future will pose a much more complex question: are there common, recognizable elements within Italian fantasy?
And to answer that, we will have to start studying our cultural production in new ways, finally dedicating to it the same attention long reserved for fantasy produced abroad.