Books like Gli indifferenti by Alberto Moravia

Thirteen‑year‑old Agostino spends a summer in a Tuscan seaside resort with his widowed mother, who begins a new romance. Feeling neglected, Agostino falls into the rough world of local youths, confronting the loss of innocence.

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Set against the backdrop of the Italian unification, the novel follows a Sicilian aristocrat as 19th‑century politics reshape his world.

The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia’s best and best-known novel — The Woman of Rome. It’s the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal, Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property. Within this story of passion and betrayal, Moravia calmly strips away the pride and arrogance hiding the corrupt heart of Italian Fascism.

Alberto Moravia’s 1954 existential novel, *Contempt*, examines a troubled marriage and the alienation of the screenwriter husband, exploring themes of love, betrayal, and artistic ambition in postwar Italy.

Il disprezzo, known in English as Contempt or A Ghost At Noon, is an Italian existential novel by Alberto Moravia that came out in 1954. It was the basis for the 1963 film Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard.

"The two women of Alberto Moravia's powerful story are mother and daughter - Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and Rosetta, a naive teenager of haunting beauty and devout faith. When the German army prepares to occupy Rome, Cesira packs a few provisions, sews her life savings into the seams of her dress, and flees south with Rosetta to her native province of Ciociara, a poor, mountainous region famous for providing the domestic servants of Rome. For nine months the two women endure hunger, cold, and filth as they await the arrival of the Allied forces.". "But the Liberation, when it comes, brings unexpected tragedy. On their way home the pair are attacked and Rosetta brutally raped by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers. This act of violence so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution. In his story of two women Moravia offers up an intimate portrayal of the anguish and destruction wrought by war, as devastating behind the lines as it is on the battlefield."--BOOK JACKET.