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Bassani wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), a novel of Ferrara's Jewish community under Fascism drawn from his own life — he was arrested for anti-fascist resistance work in 1943 and released only after Mussolini's fall. As an editor at Feltrinelli, he championed Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard after other publishers had rejected it, securing its 1958 publication and, with it, one of postwar Italian literature's defining novels.