Twenty-seven years after vanishing into a Roman grave and unread obscurity, one of Italy's most brilliant 20th-century writers has been catapulted to belated acclaim by a tug-of-war for his bones.

Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italy's answer to James Joyce, has moved centre stage as the prize in a venomous row between Rome and Milan.

Rightwing politicians in Milan, triumphant in last week's regional elections, have seized control of the city council and voted unanimously for the return of Gadda, a native son who died in 1973. But the leftwing mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, has vowed that the author of That Awful Mess on Via Merulana will not budge.

"Gadda belongs to Milan but also to Rome. It was here that he lived, worked, wrote and published."

Scholars who have fruitlessly preached the genius of Gadda thought that at last their hero was emerging from the wilderness. "When was the last time, in this land where nobody reads anymore, that a great writer was given so much importance?" said the theatre critic Giovanni Raboni, in a front-page editorial in Corriere della Sera.

But their euphoria turned sour as it emerged that giving Gadda a worthy homecoming was less important than gouging a victory in a political dogfight.

Salvatore Carrubba, Milan's cultural commissioner, has appealed to the Lombardy region to rise up in protest against Rome's kidnapping. Milan cannot rest until Gadda is interred in its Monumental cemetery, he said.

But the biographer Walter Pedulla said a reading of Gadda's novel Adalgisa revealed that he would not have wanted to end up in the "all too" Monumental cemetery.

"He would have described that place as the kind of folly that drives humanity to desperation."

It is said that the mayor of Rome agreed to the transfer last month but reneged when his centre-left colleagues in Milan lost the election. Mr Rutelli's supporters retaliated by highlighting Milan's years of neglect.

That Awful Mess on Via Merulana is the southerners' trump card. A philosophical meditation on a murder in a middle-class house during fascist rule, it is set in Rome.

But Rome's ownership is undermined by its flouting of Gadda's request to be buried near John Keats in the city's Protestant cemetery. He was buried in a different cemetery.

Both sides claim that their plots would fulfil the writer's request, made in a final interview which he titled himself: "Please, leave me in the shade."