Fifty autobiographical short stories about childhood, life in Italy before and after World War II, and growing old in Milan by the winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most celebrated Italian poets of the twentieth century. Best known for his poetry, Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale was also an elegant and incisive prose writer whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Butterfly of Dinard is a collection of fifty pieces whose distilled language, sprightliness, and subtle irony defy the limits of traditional short stories. Although initially skeptical of inventing fictional worlds, by drawing on his admiration for Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekov, and Giovanni Verga, and by trusting his own understated sense of humor, Montale began to write about his experiences, "those silly and trivial things which are at the same time important." Butterfly of Dinard represents a sort of autobiographical novel, albeit in fragmented form.