Sibilla Aleramo

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Sibilla Aleramo. Portrait photo by Mario Nunes Vais .

Sibilla Aleramo , a pseudonym of Rina Faccio, (born August 14, 1876 in Alessandria , † January 13, 1960 in Rome ) was an Italian writer, poet and feminist .

Life

Faccio was the oldest of four siblings. She spent her childhood in Milan until the age of 12 , until the family moved to Civitanova Marche . The father Ambrosio Faccio, who was a teacher, had been given the post of director of the glass factory he had built there from Count Claudio Sesto Ciccolini. Through her father, Rina later found a job as an employee in this company.

Rina's youth was not very happy in the period that followed. Her mother Ernesta fell ill with depression in 1889 and tried to kill herself by jumping off the balcony of her house. The mother's condition worsened over the years, so that she had to be admitted to a closed house in Macerata , where she died in 1917. In 1891, at the age of 15, Faccio was raped by an employee of the company, Ulderico Pierangeli. As a result, she became pregnant, but lost the child.

In 1893 Faccio was forced by her family to marry her rapist. She had another child from her unloved husband, Walter, who was born in 1895. Since she was unable to realize herself in marriage, she attempted suicide and in the following years, from 1897 onwards, took refuge in the world of literature, which she found in magazines such as Gazzetta letteraria or L'Indipendente . She also read the women's magazine Vita moderna and dealt with socialism, which was represented by the magazine Vita internazionale .

After her husband was transferred and the family moved to Milan in 1899, Rina Faccio became head of the socialist weekly L'Italia femminile, which Emilia Mariani had founded. In this magazine she was responsible for a column that accompanied discussions with the readers, and she sought intellectual contact with personalities such as Giovanni Cena , Paolo Mantegazza , Maria Montessori , Ada Negri and Matilde Serao . A friendship developed with Alessandrina Ravizza , she got to know the socialist leaders Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati and the poet Guglielmo Felice Damiani . In 1900 the family moved back to Porto Civitanova because her husband was supposed to run the glass factory there.

In January 1902 Faccio left husband and son and moved to Rome to join Giovanni Cena, editor of the magazine Nuova Antologia. In the following years she worked in the magazine and, at the suggestion of Cena, began to write her first novel Una donna. This was published under the pseudonym Sibilla Aleramo in 1906 in Milan and dealt with her previous life up to the separation of husband and child. The novel was a great success and very quickly translated into almost all European languages ​​and also published in the USA .

After this success, Aleramo continued to campaign for women, helping Cena with its activities in the social and humanitarian sector such as the creation of schools in the province of Rome and the establishment of the Committee for Popular Education in the Mezzogiorno after the earthquake in Messina 1908 .

After the relationship with Cena broke up, Aleramo led a very unsteady life and had a relationship with Lina Poletti in the summer of 1911 . In 1913 she made friends with the personalities of Italian Futurism , whose representatives, according to her diaries, were first Vincenzo Cardarelli and later Giovanni Papini , as well as Umberto Boccioni and Raffaello Franchi . From 1913 to 1914 she lived in Paris , where she met Guillaume Apollinaire and Émile Verhaeren, among others .

Aleramo met the poet Dino Campana in 1915 , published the novel Il passaggio in 1919 and her first collection of poems, Momenti, in 1921. In 1923, Endimione, a dramatic poem in three acts, was published. In 1925 she signed the manifesto of the anti-fascist intellectuals, but after a conversation with Benito Mussolini, mediated by Anteo Zamboni , became a staunch supporter of fascism . From then on she received a monthly payment of 1000 lire and an award from the Accademia d'Italia of 50,000 lire. The regime continued to support her financially and promote her works. In 1933 she joined the Associazione nazionale fascista donne artista e laureate .

In 1936 Aleramo fell in love with Franco Matacotta, a student forty years her junior, with whom she stayed for ten years. After the end of the Second World War , she became a member of the PCI , the Communist Party of Italy, campaigned for the political and social goals of the party and worked for the party newspaper l'Unità .

Alerama died in Rome in 1960 at the age of 83 after a long illness.

Works (selection)

prose
  • Una donna . Roman, Società tipografico-editrice nazionale (STEN), Rome / Turin 1906.
    • German: Una donna . New criticism publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1977. ISBN 3-8015-0149-3 .
  • Il passagio . Treves, Milan 1919.
  • Amo dunque sono . Mondadori, Milan 1927.
  • Gioie d'occasione miscellanea , Mondadori, Milan 1930.
  • Il frustino , romanzo. Mondadori, Milan 1932.
  • Dosa minore , note di traccuino. Mondadori, Milan 1938.
  • Dal mio diario. 1940-44 . Tumminelli, Rome 1945.
  • Diario di una donna. 1945-1960 .
    • German: Diary of a woman , selected and edited by Alba Morino, abridged and translated by Gisela Baratta and Maja Pflug: Frauenbuchverlag, Munich 1980. ISBN 3-921040-92-2 .
    • German: love letters to Lina . Edited by Allessandra Cenni, translated by Michaela Wunderle. New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984. ISBN 3-8015-0195-7 .
  • Lettere a Elio . Editori Riuniti, Rome 1989.
poetry
  • Momenti , Bemporad & figli 1921.
  • Endimione , poema drammatico in tre atti, Stock, Rome 1923.
  • Poesia . Mondadori, Milan 1929.

Movie

literature

  • Monika Antes: I love, therefore I am! Sibilla Aleramo, pioneer of feminism in Italy. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-3944-7 .
    • Italian: Amo, dunque sono. Sibilla Aleramo, pioniera del feminismo in Italia , Pagliali, Florence 2010, ISBN 978-88-564-0091-5 .

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Aleramo, Sibilla
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rina Faccio (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer, poet and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Alessandria , Piedmont , Italy
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1960
Place of death Rome