Chiara Barzini
Italian writer
Chiara Barzini (born 1979) is an Italian writer known for her semi-autobiographical novel Things that Happened Before the Earthquake set in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
Early life and education
Chiara Barzini was born in 1979 in Rome, Italy, the oldest child of film director Andrea Barzini and Stephania Barzini. Her grandfather was the Italian journalist and politician Luigi Barzini Jr. and her great grandfather was the Italian war correspondent, journalist, and pro-Fascist politician Luigi Barzini Sr. When Barzini was 15 in 1994, she moved to the United States with her parents and younger brother, where the family lived in Van Nuys and she attended Van Nuys High School. When her parents moved back to Italy in 1999, Barzini stayed in California and attended the University of California, Santa Cruz. Later she moved to Brooklyn, worked in Greenwich Village as a waitress, and studied creative writing at the City College of New York.
Career
Barzini has worked as a writer on films, including collaborating with Ginevra Elkann on both If Only (Magari) and I Told You So (Te l’avevo detto). She has written short stories and magazine articles, and in 2017 published her first novel, Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, a coming of age roman a clef narrative set in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1990s. The novel, which received positive reviews from newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times and Vogue, is currently being adapted as a film by Robert Zemeckis.
The public source identifies “Chiara Barzini” as italian writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chiara, Barzini and Italian.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104429740. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1994, 1999 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chiara Barzini” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.