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Cover of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

How long does it take to read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis?

Giorgio Bassani

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani takes about 5 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 22 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1962. 293 pages, about 80,575 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 57 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 22 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 21 minutes

The page count is the median across 53 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Giorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature. Made into an Academy Award - winning film in 1970, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.

Subjects: Jews, Fiction, Jewish families, Literarne s tudije, Italy, fiction, Fiction, historical

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