Bread and Wine is an anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist novel written by Ignazio Silone. It was finished while the author was in exile from Benito Mussolini's Italy. It was first published in 1936 in a German language edition in Switzerland as Brot und Wein, and in an English translation in London later the same year. An Italian version, Pane e vino, did not appear until 1937.
After the war, Silone completely revised the text, publishing a significantly different version in Italy (in 1955), reversing the title: Vino e pane (‘Wine and Bread’). This updated version is also available in English translation. Bread and Wine has been published as part of The Abruzzo Trilogy, which consists of three novels: Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow, in a translation by Eric Mosbacher, revised by Darina Silone (Steerforth Italia, 2000).
A play by Silone, Ed egli si nascose (1944), translated as And He Hid Himself, "was inspired by the author's novel Bread and Wine" (the translation states under its list of characters), the dust jacket of the translation states, "While the principal characters in this play are the same as those in Silone's Bread and Wine, this is not a dramatization of the novel."[1]
