Though she’s one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century, the rediscovery of Ortese’s work is quite recent. Il mare non bagna Napoli is a collection of five stories where the author recounts the wretched conditions of Naples after WW2. The book was highly criticised by the Neapolitan intellectuals who were depicted in one of the stories, and due to the criticism Ortese decided to leave Naples, the city she loved the most.
 
‘A Pair of Eyeglasses’ is the first story of the collection and is about a girl from a poor neighbourhood of Naples – due to her poor sight, she is given a pair of specs by her aunt, who sacrifices more than “ten days of bread” to buy them. When she tries the specs in the shop, the girl – Nunziata – is very excited as she can finally see a world previously unknown to her, shining and opulent, but when she tries them on later in her poor neighbourhood she realises she’s surrounded by misery and filth, not by the world she had imagined so far. Blindness, we discover with Nunziata, had protected her from acknowledging her real social status.
 
Ortese depicts Nunziata’s slump of hopes with an unparalleled intensity and suggests, with heartbreaking force, that dreams and happiness are tied and proportional to one’s social class.

First published in Il mare non bagna Napoli, Einaudi, 1953 / Latest English version in Evening Descends Upon the Hills, Pushkin Press, 2018