Qwhen the plane he was traveling on crashed against the slopes of the Stromboli volcano, Mura was only 48 years old. He was returning to Rome from Libya, wobbling through the air with other passengers in a stormy sky. His life ended dramatically on March 16, 1940a much darker epilogue than the pink color that had made her novels and her name, indeed her stage name, famous and celebrated.
The writer Mura aboard the transatlantic Conte Verde. She was born in Bologna from a modest family, she took the nickname
of a famous Russian femme fatale.
Maria Assunta Giulia Volpi Nannipieri had chosen, to sign her books, the pseudonym of Mura, or the nickname of the Russian countess Maria Nicolajeva Tarnowska, woman charmer who had caused a series of suicides and killings, so much so that she ended up on trial for murder, in Italy, in 1910. But, in reality, more than the gloomy stories Mura liked those of love and, early in his career, those for children.
She was born in Bologna in 1892 into a modest family: his mother, Adelaide Nannipieri, was a housewife, while his father, Antonio Volpi, had first been a waiter and then, after moving to Livorno, had become an itinerant food vendor. Later the family arrived in Lombardy and moved to a farmhouse in Gavirate. It was in this village overlooking Lake Varese that Maria Assunta met the writer and poet Annie Vivanti, the clandestine love of Giosuè Carducci, who knew how to understand and support the artistic veinthe tendency to transgression and the passion for writing of this petite girl with dark eyes.
A passion that led her to Milan to collaborate with the Touring Club and with various newspapers including Il Telegrafo, Il Secolo and Novella. This will be the weekly that will make it known to women, also thanks to serialized stories and the letter column. Also important was the sentimental and professional meeting with Alessandro Chiavolini, editor of the Popolo d’Italia, at that time the most important national newspaper, who would later become a Fascist minister and Mussolini’s private secretary. Together they published three children’s books but, after the four-handed venture, Mura began to sign her works alone, thanks also to the support of the publisher Sonzogno. She had a style all of her own, she wrote as she liked, with an irreverent vein that made her famous above all among Italian women, but also abroad, where her stories were regularly translated. A success that even allowed her to surpass her “rival”, Amalia Liana Odescalchi, renamed by Gabriele D’Annunzio with the nom de plume Liala. Moreover, the two authors had different style, character and social extraction. Even if Liala after reading the novel Small wanted to meet Mura, the two did not like each other. And it could not be otherwise because Mura reverses the moral of Liala’s storyerasing the sense of frustration, the punishments, the sad endings of the protagonists.
The love between two women
Her heroines triumph, ceasing to be “good girls”. In his first novel, titled Perfidiesfrom 1919, we speak of thelove between two women, Sibilla and Nicla, a theme that affected the language, ideas and thoughts of the intellectuals of the time (the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti liked it very much). In the book the same protagonist, Sibilla, declares: «I love women. They fascinate me. They interest me. They are the most beautiful example of human simplicity through a complicated network of moods… I study them. If I can, I pervert them: perhaps because making others similar to ourselves is the natural law of every soul… And I will speak of women: wicked women, who have a lively intelligence and a fresh soul…».
And when it comes to describing Nicla, the sentences become even more exciting: «I remain motionless, but I feel that my strength is failing. Nicla is in front of me naked, smiling, with long wavy blond hair down to her back, with the arms raised and the eyes half closed on the mouth». Commercial success came with the unscrupulous Piccola, from 1921, the story of a precocious teenager who rebels against provincial life, loves a married man she has to give up, and faces years of loneliness, but the courage to defy conventions. And then there was the book-scandal, Sambadu, black love, published in issue 10 de Novella novelsin April 1934. It cost three lire and, on the cover, there was a white woman wrapped in a blue blanket in the arms of a black man, in a green jacket suit.
Mussolini’s censorship
The beautiful drawing of the file bore the signature of the Trieste painter and publicist Marcello Dudovich. An illustration that already revealed the content, the love story between the wealthy widow Silvia and Sambadù, an engineer born in Senegal but assimilated to the Italian culture for the studies and the long stay in our country. A love story that published just at the time of the war in Ethiopia, the Duce interpreted as a real and bold challenge, judging it without hesitation and in a superficial way on the basis of the cover rather than the text itself. Although the author was immersed in the culture of the time and certainly faithful to the regime, he censored the book and ordered it removed from the shelves.
The interesting human and literary story of the writer is told by Marcello Sorgi in the book Mura, the writer who challenged Mussolini (Marsilio Specchi, 2022). «Sciascia would have liked her – writes Sorgi – who had an extraordinary taste for the contradictions of history. The writer was harshly censored by Mussolini for the “lack of racism” of an absolutely racist book, right from the title, Sambadù, amore negro. Moreover, a book that neither the Duce nor his closest collaborators, starting with the dauphin Galeazzo Ciano, bothered to read, before making it disappear from circulation».
Walls. The writer who challenged Mussolini, by Marcello Sorgi, Marsilius160 pages, €17
It was about women of the 1920s
The plot winds on the background of a lazy and cynical Rome, reminiscent of that of the Indifferent of Moravia, and is consumed until the marriage fails, in the impossibility of combining different habits and cultures. Finally, to precipitate everything will be the birth of a son, who rekindles and foments the protagonist’s fears about miscegenation. But of this, of a plot in which almost every page the unraveling of the story is accompanied by racist arguments, in fact, no one takes into account. The color cover in which a white woman abandons herself in the arms of a black man is enough to condemn it: on the eve of the introduction of the racial laws – we are in 1934 – the “sentence” and the seizure of the book are unappealable.
While devoid of any political connotation, his novels had gradually become an unacceptable example of literature frondist for the regime, who saw a threat in those simple plots, centered on female figures in open contrast to the fascist model of a “mare” woman, pillar of the traditional family, who had to give children to the country. After the censorship and the accusation of having written a book “that offends the dignity of the race” Mura, despite her attempts to meet the Duce (she will meet Ciano, the head of book censorship), becomes under special surveillance by the regime (the State Archives keep a file “Mura writer”, which Sorgi consulted for write his book). Mura has to pay for what he wrote and for his lifestyle. As Sorgi writes, «he will never have the time to re-read, and then have in his hands – satisfaction of every writer – his latest novel, Camellia in flamespublished posthumously in 1940 with a preface by Flavia Steno where it was emphasized that anyone who wanted to get to know the women of the 1920s and 1930s should have read Mura’s books».
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