C.heck’s name is Petronilla? It sounds ridiculous and immediately evokes that American character from the comic strips of the 1920s, published in Italy in Il Corriere dei Piccoli: the wife of the lazy Arcibaldo, ugly as sin and ready to arm herself with a rolling pin when her husband misbehaves.
For us, Petronilla is above all the name by which we know the culinary alter ego (or rather, “cucinario”) of Dr. Amalia Moretti Foggiaclass of 1872: Petronilla the housewife, the one who since 1928 has been dispensing advice and recipes on The Sunday of the Courierdestined to become so popular and loved that it gave its name to a pot that acted as an oven in an Italy where you had to make do (also) in the kitchen. An Italy in which putting a plate on the table represented the most important task of women.
Amalia, the woman behind the pseudonym Petronilla
But behind the funny pseudonym used to sign recipes «quick to drink, superfine to the taste and that do not empty the purse», Little stories of daily and family life, behind the alter ego of a solicitous wife, of a mother of a family with spoiled children, tormented by her know-it-all and unpleasant sister-in-law, there is a very different woman. The real one.
Amalia Moretti Foggia (1872-1947) specialized in paediatrics and, in parallel with her journalistic career, practiced for over 40 years in a popular clinic.
Mantovana, daughter of a pharmacist, Amalia even has two degrees. Even though her father would have wanted her to be a pharmacist to perpetuate the tradition, she made her head as a pioneer: she was already born when women were allowed access to universities but there were still students in universities. just a few. Her mother had died of pneumonia at the age of 34; she was a little girl and she had taken an oath: to learn how to heal people. Not only with galenic preparations like dad did.
Degree, doctorate and specialization
From Padua he takes home a degree in natural sciences, then wins a scholarship e in Bologna he became a doctor of medicine, in 1898, among the very first to succeed, following the lessons of the great clinician Augusto Murri. At 27 he is already an example of emancipation, when he moved to Florence for specialize in pediatrics to the Mayer clinic and there he meets Anna Kuliscioff, also a doctor, founder of the socialist party with Filippo Turati.
Committed to the social
It will be Anna who will facilitate her transfer to Milan, where Amalia comes into contact with numerous women involved in social work: the philanthropist Alessandrina Ravizza; Paolina Schiff, first teacher of German literature in Pavia; the teacher Linda Malnati, champion of women’s education; Ersilia Majno Bronzini, founder of Asilo Mariuccia and also the great supporter of gender equality Anna Maria Mozzoni. Meanwhile, he becomes the personal doctor (egrande friend) of the poet Ada Negrthe. More and more inclined to do than to say, Amalia immediately sets to work. Before her, thanks to Majno, she was hired as a tax doctor by the Mutual Aid Female Workers’ Society.
In 1902 he moved to the Poliambulanza di Porta Venezia, a territorial garrison where the most disadvantaged popular classes turn to. Women exhausted from work in the factory and at home, intoxicated by the fumes, often victims of violent husbands; girls who came from the countryside full of hope and ended up in prostitution; servants made pregnant by their masters, who risk their lives with domestic abortions; undernourished, stunted children who live in decay. These are times of great ferment: in the same year the Carcano Law was voted, a clumsy first step towards the protection of women and children in the factory. Also in 1902 Amalia, thirty years old, that is, very seasoned by the standards of the time, married Domenico della Rovere, a medical colleague known at work.
A “doctor” with a mustache
In their house in via Sandro Sandri at number 2, Milan is more open, more advanced, more lively. And so was Ferdinando D’Amora from Campania, the director of The Sunday of the Courierwho frequents them, has an idea: Amalia could write a petty medicine column in the newspaper. She does not ask for better: besides working at the Poliambulanza (which she will do for more than 40 years) Amalia holds courses, conferences, teaches, explains, is a public health activist, deeply interested in social medicine. Everyone says that she has the makings of a popularizer, with that simple and engaging way of telling and explaining.
Armed with her proverbial common sense, knowing his chickens, he agrees to hide behind the bizarre and almost exotic pseudonym of Doctor Amal, an imaginary human doctor and therefore universally acceptable. Some of her friends from Anna Kuliscioff’s tour will perhaps wrinkle their noses, but never mind: it’s the result that counts. Behind this mustache mask he will dispense lifelong advice and his hugely successful articles they will be collected in volumes and reprinted until the 1990s. He will teach everyone the abc of medical care and hygiene rules from the pages of a very popular newspaper and this result is well worth a compromise. Here you can write, for example, against do-it-yourself abortion: «All of you, women, be careful before swallowing rye mushrooms; nor do you listen, if life is dear to you, who gives you these advice and even if someone suggests it to you, do not listen to her… ».
Fame comes with a … stunt double: Petronilla
Immediately after the column of folk medicine, where Amalia will introduce her own way of communicating with the reader lightly, the director will propose a cooking one, with the intention here too of offering a social service. Lthe doctor now takes off her white coat and puts on her apronbut with the help of his family cook: she is not a queen of the kitchen, she is an emancipated woman who in reality has no children, lives outside the home, has a profession that takes her a lot.
Petronilla is therefore just a happy invention, but one that will work wonderspassing en souplesse from autarchic cuisine to that of wartime and ration cards, always with optimism, with a smile on his lips, with love, teaching how to make mayonnaise from a potato patiently pounded and pounded and pounded: the famous “Cuisine of the without”. “It’s as if from those years when I started writing for Sunday I had begun to live two different and complementary existences, one as an emancipated, modern and intellectual woman, the other as a “little woman of the house”, entirely devoted to children, husband and cookers. It is as if knowing that I existed in those notebooks had given more meaning to my life and a strong thread had tied me to the lives of all those women “we read in The voices of Petronilla (Milan, Salani 2010).
The voices of Petronilla by Alessandra De Vizzi, Roberta Schira, Salani, pp. 274, € 16.80
Meanwhile Dr. Amalia will continue to work tirelessly for those in needpractically until his death, which occurred at the age of 75 on 11 July 1947 in Milan, after three years of immobility in bed due to a severe arthritic condition, as La Domenica del Corriere recalls on 20 July of the same year. Even when she could no longer move, she continued to write. “Three people in one” went with her to make the pain of loss more burning, the heartfelt columnist underlines, referring to her two literary identities and her authentic personality.
The occasion to celebrate it
Forty-two years of service to the Poliambulanza is a long time. But in all of Milan there is not a street, a plaque, a statue that remembers herDr. Amalia Moretti Foggia in Della Rovere, aka Dr. Amal, aka Petronilla. Who knows that this anniversary of 2022 will not remedy, though she probably wouldn’t have cared much. “Being useful was her rule of life,” says the obituary of July 15. “For itself, the complacency of knowing that her efforts had not been in vain.”
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