Geography played a crucial role in defining the Italian experience of “modernity.” Italy's official modernist movement, futurism, was the offspring of the northern urban centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, cities in which the con- flict between modernization and cultural tradition was the most severe, while the Italian modernists discussed here all approached the complex question of modern subjectivity from standpoints conditioned to a significant degree by their own regional origins. The culture of Pirandello's preindustrialized Sicily, remotely distant from the modern industrial province of Svevo's Trieste, accentuated the playwright's terror of life falling apart in a world of paradox and contradiction, a fear that Svevo had under control, and Gadda, armed with the weapons of a scientific culture, sought to overcome in parody and satire. However, in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the “modernity” these writers faced each in his own unique way was one with the industrialization of production, the acceleration of the tempo of life due to developments in science and technology, and the emergence of new forms of class struggle. The ambiguity, anguish, and spiritual fluctuation, deriving from the breakdown of old hierarchies and the expansion of the capitalist market, were the general life-symptoms of a collective Western humanity, which the literary art of these authors at once incorporated and attempted to treat.