The Problem of Distance: Giorgio Bassani, The Etruscans and the Limits of Compassion

Moral philosophers have always been particularly intrigued by phenomena of dis-tance – whether spatial, temporal, emotive or cultural, or a combination of any of these, for distance seems to impact the human capacity to feel empathy or compas-sion. Giorgio Bassani, in his 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (hence-forth Garden),1 suggests how to expand our capacity for compassion to break down distance (or at least to overcome it in part) and guarantee the survival of memory and humanity; and he does so by using the symbolic heritage of Etruscan culture.