ONE OF THE best novels ever written about Los Angeles, according to many a literary critic, is John Fante’s Ask the Dust. But these days, that novel, which was published in 1939 and tells the story of Arturo Bandini, an Italian-American writer in Bunker Hill during the Great Depression, is most fervently celebrated 6,300 miles away, in a remote town in the mountains east of Rome.
For the last 20 years, Torricella Peligna, population 1,000, has held an annual literary festival in Fante’s honor. It lasts for four days. This year’s event, which took place at the end of summer, had 35 sessions, with some drawing more than 500 attendees. Some of the offerings took place at the town’s library, which, of course, is named after Fante.
