In November 1948 the novel Il Fuoco del Mondo (‘The Fire of the World’), by my father, the Italian writer Giuseppe Jorio (1902-1995), was still in unbound sheets when the Rome police, alerted that it contained ‘descriptions of sexual intercourse’, sequestered it. One month later the public prosecutor decided to prosecute my father for obscenity. A number of copies of the book were hurriedly put together for the trial.
An Author on Trial
In 1954, after five trials in six years, my father’s fight to save his novel and his reputation was lost: he became the first writer in post-war Italy to be convicted for obscenity, the only one to receive a prison sentence and the only one convicted for a novel which wasn't yet published. All copies of the book were destroyed except for one, saved by the author. I was eleven years old when the trials started, and fifteen when they ended.
Il Fuoco del Mondo was my father's third novel. The first two had been published before the war with great critical success. He kept on writing into old age, but because of the conviction he was marginalised and spent his last years in bitter isolation. By the time of his death in 1995, at the age of ninety-three, he was totally forgotten.
When his partner of the last thirty years died in 2013, she left me all my father’s surviving papers and documents – diaries, letters, notes of all kinds, manuscripts, reviews – as well as the surviving copy of Il Fuoco del Mondo.
I took the whole lot to London, where I have been living since 1971, and started to read. It soon became clear that my father had been the victim of a great injustice, one rooted in the complex and turbulent socio-political situation in post-war Italy, when the ruling Christian Democracy party, openly fuelled by the Vatican, adopted illiberal and aggressive censorship policies ‘in defence of decency’ .
Despite the fact that our relationship had been non existent for most of my adult life, I was so enraged on learning how my father had been treated and upset by how much he had suffered that I decided to tell the truth about the trial. The result was An Author on Trial.
Writing the book became a journey of painful discoveries. The condemned novel, I found out, was based on an extramarital relationship which my father had had in the 1930s when his then childless marriage to my mother seemed irreparably broken. When my father ended the relationship, his young lover was left broken hearted, and she expressed her feelings in letters which are very moving for her sensitivity and the beauty of her writing. When my father went back to my mother she accepted to carry on with her unhappy marriage on condition of having a child, and that child was me. That, however, wasn't the end of his love for his lover, and...... the whole story is told in my book.
About the author
Luciano Iorio, the son of Giuseppe and Bruna Jorio, was born in Rome in 1937 and moved to London in 1971. In his native country he gained a music diploma and a degree in law. He decided to become a professional musician, and has enjoyed a busy international career as violist of three distinguished chamber groups, Solisti Veneti, Cummings String Trio and English String Quartet. Since his retirement he has taken up pottery, and has spent five years researching and writing this book.