Published in 1947, ‘La romana’ marks an important stage in the development of Moravia's fiction. The protagonist of the novel, set in Rome at the time of the war in Ethiopia, is an extraordinary female figure who is profoundly alive and modern. ‘With ‘La romana’,’ Moravia wrote, ’I wanted to create the figure of a woman full of contradictions and errors and, nonetheless, capable by naive force of vitality and impetus of affection of overcoming these contradictions and remedying these errors, and arriving at a clairvoyance and balance that the most intelligent and the most gifted are often denied.
