garden can be traced through such disparate works as Blake's Songs of Innocence, de Nerval's Sylvie and that timeless children's classic. The Secret Garden. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Giorgio Bassani has used this image to recapture the flavour of his narrator's childhood and to tell the tragic story of a doomed family.
The time is the 1930s and the Finzi-Continis are rich Jews living in Ferrara. Cultured and proud of their Sephardic origins, they live in quiet splendour, surrounded by their vast gar
