Abstract: The Italian postmodernism in literature began with the new avant-garde and is thus regarded as “belated”. In the late 1970s the new avant-garde became obsolete and in its place came a literary diversity provoking the prevalence of popular fiction in the market until the 1980s—“the postmodernist years”. By the 1990s, the Giovani Cannibali emerged, marking the waning of the Italian postmodernism in the intensified process of popularism. Though theoretical discussion of postmodernism in Italy is “not enough”, the two concepts, i.e., “crisis of reason” and “weak thought”, along with the debate on a return to realism in the beginning of the 21st century, are, more or less, reflective of the Italian consciousness of postmodernism and of the vitality of Italian realism. Even from such typical examples of postmodern narrative as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and The Name of the Rose, we can see the chanting of popularism that is inseparable from literary tradition.