Italian · 1906–1972
Italian novelist, journalist, and painter whose work blends realism with allegory. Born in Belluno, he spent his career at Corriere della Sera, covering everything from opera to the Ethiopian War. His fiction—The Tartar Steppe, Barnabo of the Mountains, Sixty Stories—takes ordinary situations and lets dread seep in. Soldiers wait for attacks that never come; time accelerates without warning; bureaucracies trap souls. Kafka's influence shows, but Buzzati writes with Italian clarity and landscape. His paintings share the fiction's dreamlike unease. He died in Milan, still working.