Who was Sibilla Aleramo: life, loves, memorable works

TOThe registry was Rina Marta Felicina Faccio, but everyone knows her as Sibilla Aleramo. 64 years have passed since his death, which occurred in Rome on 13 January 1960. The day after her death, Eugenio Montale describes her like this: «Having survived many storms, she still carried with her, and imposed on others, that firmness, that sense of dignity that had been her true strength and her secret».

They were the firmness and dignity of someone who had lived a difficult life, events that led her to become one of the first feminist writers in Italy. She was born on August 14, 1876 in Alexandria, she was the eldest of four children. Her father, Ambrogio, was an engineer with a strong and non-conformist character and her mother, Ernesta, an introverted housewife, lover of poetry and music.

It was the trips to follow his father’s business that characterized his childhood. First in Vercelli, then in Milan, where Rina attended elementary school, until arriving in Porto Civitanova Marche in 1881, when her father took over the management of a glass factory.

The factory and rape

A period in which Rina joined her beloved father as secretary in the administration of the company. Thus he abandoned his studies, read self-taught books, knows the world of work closely, begins a journey of self-transformation, cutting her hair “boy style” and taking on a very different attitude from girls of her age, especially in a town in Central Italy. In that factory that she herself describes as “glittering” she feels great and very distant from the feminine example of her mother, who she considers too weak and prone to melancholy. A separation that becomes even clearer when the mother, due to depression, attempts suicide throwing herself from the balcony of her home, and then closing herself in a strong isolation that leads her to be admitted to the Macerata mental hospitalwhere he died in 1917.

Meanwhile, the glass factory does not reveal itself to be the “glittering” environment it seemed, but something dark and violent where someone like Ulderico Pierangeli, her father’s employee who, after an insistent courtship, ends up raping her. Rina is only fifteen years old, becomes pregnant following the rape and is forced by her father into a shotgun marriage, as the morality of the time dictates. However, that child was not born, due to a miscarriage, and Rina finds herself the prisoner of an aggressive husband and a humiliating marriage. Thinking that her status as a mother can allow her to escape her pain, she nevertheless seeks a child with her husband and gives birth to Walter, but her choice turns out to be an unhappy one.

The excitement of Milan

In 1899 she moved to Milan with her child and her husband, who unsuccessfully attempted to start a commercial business. It is a city in great movement and Rina finds fertile ground to cultivate what had always been her passion, writing. She had already started writing for the Literary journalthe feminist magazine Modern lifethe periodical, of socialist inspiration, International life.

She was entrusted with the direction of the weekly Italy women, founded by Emilia Mariani, feminist activist. In the discussion column with readers he seeks the collaboration of progressive intellectuals (Paolo Mantegazza, Matilde Serao, Ada Negri), and has the opportunity to get to know Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati.

Depression and escape to Rome

But this happy pause ends with her return to Civitanova, where her husband takes over the management of the factory previously managed by her father. Rina falls into depression and follows in his mother’s footsteps, attempting suicide with laudanum. An extreme gesture which, however, will make her understand the need for a change, to find a greater and higher purpose in her life, that of writing.

She thus decided to abandon her husband and son to move to Rome in February 1902. Once here, he tries to obtain custody of his son but the law doesn’t allow him and in the end he ends up seeing him only once, when he has grown up.

Rina’s death and Sibilla’s birth

In the capital she becomes romantically linked to the poet and novelist Giovanni Cena, director of the magazine New Anthologywho invented the pseudonym Sibilla Aleramo for her. With that name he began to collaborate and write the autobiographical novel A woman, considered one of the first feminist novels in Italy. In her pages she connects the origins of her own suffering, of the problematic relationship with her husband and motherhood, to the roles and social position of women. A historical document on the difficulty of being a woman in early twentieth century society which testifies to a strong social denunciation of clear gender inequality. The book achieved great success and carried the Aleramo name even outside the Italian borders.

After the breakup with Cena she begins a wandering life that brings her closer to Milan and the futurist movementto Paris and the poets Apollinaire and Verhaeren, finally to Rome and the entire intellectual and artistic environment of those years. Years of crazy and numerous loves, always passionate and often newand of writings, notebook and pen in hand, in the obsession of fixing rivers of words that translate into memories, notes, reflections, diaries, letters, private outbursts, descriptions of daily events.

Fully understand a complex character like that of Sibilla Aleramo, feminist and great writer of the twentieth century, is not simple. His literary production explored the social and historical events of the time but also states of mind, feelings, the search for sincerity combined with a visceral drive towards freedom, which comes to be the only moral duty to follow, above all else. , whatever it takes.

The love letters

In 1908 he met Lina Poletti, known as Cordula, a young intellectual met at the first National Congress of Italian women, which conquers the writer. Between the two it begins a passionate love storyevidenced by a series of letters later collected in the book Lucid madness: love letters to Lina.

Other beautiful letters, collected in the volume A journey called love. Letters 1916-1918are addressed to Dino Campana, with whom he had an intense relationship which ended with the poet’s hospitalization in the Tuscan mental hospital of Castelpulci. A passionate story that inspired Michele Placido to direct the film A journey called lovewith Laura Morante and Stefano Accorsi who play the two lovers.

The men in her life will also appear between the lines of The passage (1919), which he always integrates in an autobiographical key A womanand in I love therefore I am, which she defined as “a work in one go”, an epistolary novel published in 1927. There are 43 passionate letters to her distant lover, written to become, upon his return, “their book”. The protagonists are Sibilla and Luciano, in reality Giulio Parise, a young esotericist, loved by the writer between 1924 and 1926. Despite the numerous collaborations between the two world wars, economic income is reduced to the bare minimum.

The encounter with politics

In 1933 he enrolled inNational fascist association of women artists and graduates, a much discussed membership, but as happened for other intellectuals, “necessary” in the context of the time. And then a new turning point, the passion for the twenty-year-old poet Franco Matacotta and joining the Italian Communist Party in 1946which in short makes her the voice of the party, with conferences and articles published in L’Unità and other left-wing newspapers.

Far from literary aesthetics, chooses to put himself at the service of society. After a long illness spent in solitude and hardship, on 13 January 1960 in Rome Sibilla met death «mother, sister, beloved, someone who takes me, someone who wants me». And her death took her, but left the greatness of one of the most nonconformist figures of twentieth-century European literature intact and alive.

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