Agostino: l'incompiuta rinascita di un adolescente di città in periferia

Alberto Moravia’s Agostino is a short novel about an unsuccessful initiation to maturity: after meeting some boys from a lower-class family during a summer holiday in the suburbs, a bourgeois adolescent grown up in the city discovers what sex and disparity between social classes are. These discoveries destroy the protagonist’s childish naivety, but don’t allow him to build a new and more mature identity. Agostino and also other novels about traumatic and weak personal growths clearly illustrate an important part of the complex Bildungsroman’s phenomenology of the 20th century.