Natalia Ginzburg is one of those writers everyone in Italy knows and almost no one abroad reads any more. Levi admired her. Calvino edited her at Einaudi. Her husband Leone Ginzburg was tortured to death by the German police in Regina Coeli prison in February 1944, leaving her with three small children and a prose that would never again carry an ornament it did not need. She wrote Lessico famigliare, which won the Strega in 1963 and remains the best book ever written on the way a family invents a private dialect to survive its own grief. And she wrote, between 1944 and 1962, the eleven short essays collected as Le piccole virtù, which Einaudi published in Turin that year under a title so modest it has been quietly misread ever since.
The misreading is this. The book is not a defence of the small virtues. It is a sentence against them. The title essay — written for the New Statesman in 1960, in English, and then rewritten in Italian for the collection — is a six-page indictment of exactly the kind of parenting a prosperous post-war Europe was learning to call responsibility. It should be read once a year by anyone with a child, a classroom, or a budget.
The sentence I return to is this:
“As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift, but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution, but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness, but frankness and a love of truth; not tact, but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success, but a desire to be and to know.”
Read it slowly, because its structure is a trap. Each pair is a sacrifice: a smaller good set beside a larger one, with the smaller good disowned. Ginzburg knows exactly what she is doing. Thrift is not evil; it is simply what a parent reaches for when the parent has lost the nerve to teach generosity. Caution is not evil; it is what a frightened household offers in place of courage. Shrewdness, tact, the desire for success — none of these are vices. They are the daily, respectable, bourgeois substitutes that take the place of the virtues a serious life actually needs, once the household has quietly agreed that the real ones are too dangerous to raise a child on.
She wrote this in 1960, in a country in the middle of its miracolo economico. The Fiat 500 had been on the road for three years. Milanese apartments were being wired for new refrigerators faster than the countryside could empty into them. A whole stratum of Italian families was learning, for the first time in centuries, to be comfortable, and discovering, as Ginzburg saw with uncommon clarity, that comfort has its own pedagogy. It teaches thrift because it has something to lose. It teaches caution because it fears falling. It teaches shrewdness because it must now negotiate everything, including its own children. It teaches the desire for success because success is the only remaining proof that the whole arrangement was worth it. The great virtues — generosity, courage, truth, charity, the hunger to be and to know — have no place in that curriculum, because they are precisely the virtues that will tempt a child, one day, to walk away from the house.
Her diagnosis was that an entire European middle class had, without noticing, exchanged a civilisation for a lifestyle. The small virtues are what a lifestyle requires. The great virtues are what a civilisation is made of. A people that teaches its children the first set and quietly suppresses the second will, in two generations, no longer be able to raise either a saint or a dissident, and will be puzzled, when the century turns strange, by its own inability to produce the kind of citizen the moment demands.
It is difficult to read this essay in 2026 without something in the chest tightening. We are now four generations deep into the arrangement she described. Our children are not raised; they are optimised. Thrift has returned under the name of financial literacy. Caution has returned under the name of safety. Shrewdness has been rebranded as emotional intelligence. Tact has become the only form of moral intelligence most schools still know how to teach. And the desire for success — measured, now, in followers, offers, admissions, exit multiples — has been so completely substituted for the desire to be and to know that the two have begun to feel, to a serious young person, like the same word. The small virtues have won. Ginzburg would recognise the house we are living in. She would not pretend to be surprised.
The strange tenderness of the essay is that it is not written from above. She is not a moralist with a lectern. She is a widow with three young children and an income from a publishing house, writing from a flat in Rome in which thrift, caution and tact are, in fact, daily necessities. She knows exactly what the small virtues cost to refuse. She refuses them anyway, in the one place that matters: the moral economy of the household. The great virtues are not what you practise in the office. They are what you teach your child by what you praise, what you grieve for, what you tolerate at the table, and what you refuse to make the house turn on. In this sense Ginzburg is far closer to Simone Weil than to any post-war Italian liberal: the household is the first political unit, and whatever is not taught there will not be learned anywhere else.
Read the book. It is not long. Read “Lui e io” afterwards — six pages, perhaps the most honest marriage ever written down — and “Elogio e compianto dell’Inghilterra,” her strange, severe affection for a London that no longer exists. But begin with the title essay, late in the afternoon, with the phone in another room, and let the sentence land. Then look, honestly, at the household you keep, and ask which set of virtues it is actually passing on. The question is not whether we are good people. The question is which curriculum our lives are, in silence, teaching the children who are watching. A century that only remembers how to teach the small virtues is already a century that has decided, without saying so, which kind of future it is prepared to raise, and which kind it has quietly given up.
Ginzburg knew. She wrote it down in 1960 in a few plain Italian sentences and let the century make its decision. The decision is not yet closed. There is still time to teach the other list.