Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola and her three brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, I bambini, in the magazine Solaria.
Marriage and family
In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in 1944 after suffering severe torture, including crucifixion, in jail. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969.
Career
After her marriage, she used the name "Natalia Ginzburg" on most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym "Alessandra Tornimparte" in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period, when Jews were banned from publishing. Ginzburg spent much of the 1940s working for the publisher Einaudi in Turin in addition to her creative writing. They published some of the leading figures of postwar Italy, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg's second novel was published in 1947. The experiences that she and her husband had during the war altered her perception of her identification as a Jew. She thought deeply about the questions aroused by the war and the Holocaust, dealing with them in fiction and essays. She became supportive of Catholicism, arousing controversy among her circle, because she believed that Christ was a persecuted Jew. She opposed the removal of crucifixes in public buildings but her purported conversion to Catholicism is controversial and most sources still consider her an "atheist Jewess". Beginning in 1950, when Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome, she entered the most prolific period of her literary career. During the next 20 years, she published most of the works for which she is best known. She and Baldini were deeply involved in the cultural life of the city. In 1964 she played the role of Mary of Bethany in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983.
