ABSTRACT
Once the conflict was over, scores of young Italian intellectuals saw the future of Italy as a blank page on which they could leave their mark, thus contributing to the reconstruction of a society debilitated by years of dictatorship, war and foreign occupation. Elio Vittorini's credentials, authorship of Conversazione in Sicilia and Uomini e no, his role as a communist partisan and his militant involvement in the cultural arena, made him a candidate for an influential role within left-wing circles. However, Vittorini's difficulty in conforming to the cultural directives of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) exploded into open polemic well before the end of the 1940s. Vittorini explicitly rejected the idea of using an artistic work in order to promote or to support political ideas. In a nutshell, it might be said say that Vittorini seemed particularly puzzled by the nature of the deep social changes that were sweeping through Italy in the years of the so-called 'economic miracle'.
