[1] In 1947, he won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (variously translated as Miriam, A Time to Kill, and The Short Cut).

Flaiano's name is indissolubly tied to Rome, a city he loved and hated, as he was a caustic witness to its urban evolutions and debacles, its vices and its virtues.

Critic Richard Eder wrote in Newsday: "To read the late Ennio Flaiano is to imagine a bust of Ovid or Martial, placed in a piazza in Rome and smiling above a traffic jam.

A fine and ironic moralist, at once tragic and bitter, Flaiano produced narrative works and other prose writings permeated by an original satiric vein and by a vivid sense of the grotesque through which he stigmatised the paradoxical aspects of contemporary reality.

[citation needed] In the last section of his book, The Via Veneto Papers, journalist Giulio Villa Santa included an interview with Flaiano for Swiss-Italian Radio, two weeks before his death.

A few months later we met each other in a restaurant in Rome and were introduced and, naturally, she experienced an awkward moment, for she didn’t think that this ancient writer was still alive.

Recognizing achievement in cinema, theatre, creative writing, and literary criticism, the international prize is awarded annually in Flaiano's hometown of Pescara.

Flaiano was known for his quotations, including "Chastity is the mirage of obscene people", "I got so upset I couldn't sleep the whole afternoon", "If the peoples knew each other better, they would hate each other more", "In thirty years time Italy won't be like its governments intended, but as its TV dictated", "Remorse used to come afterwards in my love stories; now it goes before me", "Italians are always ready to run to the rescue of the winners", and "Italy is the country where the shortest line between two points is an arabesque."