The Woman of Rome     by Alberto Moravia, Translated by Lydia Holland Original title: La romana Original language: Italian Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: June 1949 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 9997406222 List Price: $10.00, £6.36 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.36 Published by Steerforth Press Pub. Date: 1999 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.18 x 8.46 x 5.54 ISBN: 1883642809 List Price: $16.00, £10.17 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.16 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1949 Pub. Place: UK Not available for ordering

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Adriana tells her own story: the story of loss of innocence and subsequent downfall. Her beauty and her natural predisposition for a simple, tranquil life are circumscribed by the corrupt environment that surrounds her and that not even her love for Gino, a driver whom she hopes to marry, can save her from. The discovery that he is already married and has deceived her is a final blow to her natural virtuousness. She becomes a prostitute, the lover of various and varied men: Mino the revolutionary student who she loves, Astarita the fascist functionary who she despises but who loves her, Sonzogno, the crook whose child she eventually carries. The tales of these three fateful men intertwine with hers but do not truly corrupt her. In fact, in spite of living in what a bourgeois society would consider a scandalous situation, she embodies a more authentic form of innocence and morality which owe more to instinct and nature than to an imposed system of values. The novel closes on an image of hope: Adriana is about to give birth to her child, perhaps into a less unhappy, more straightforward world and one not dominated by violence.


The book lives in its protagonist, the prostitute Adriana, who is undeniably the most vital and sympathetic woman among Moravia’s fictional creations, but also one of the most important and intensely emotional characters in contemporary Italian literature.

‘In any case, I felt so tired that morning, a kind of sensuous laziness, and was less unhappy than I had been the evening before. Mother had gone out very early and I knew she would not come back before midday. So I lingered on in bed, and this was my first pleasure at the beginning of a new phase of my life, which from now on was to be one solely of pleasure. Every day since I was born I had got up in the early hours, and lying idly in bed without doing anything was a real luxury for me. I had never yielded to it, but now I made up my mind to lie in bed whenever I felt like it , and I thought I would act in the same way about all the things I had rejected up till now on the grounds of my poverty and my dreams of a normal family life. I thought how I enjoyed love-making and money and the things money can bring, and I told myself from now on I would never refuse love or money or what money could bring, if I had the chance.’ p116