LEGGENDARIA N. 82

"SIRENE" 

68 pagine, 8 euro

If summer is the season when we all need to leave off, it's also true the change mustn't necessarily be geographical. This summer issue of Leggendaria offers plenty of choice for mental and emotional change with an invitation to plunge into books with body and soul. Under a beach umbrella, on a lake, or in the mountains.
Mermaids and sirens guide and enchant us this sumer, also as a pretext to reinterpret mythological figures and to go back to the origin of archetypes.
Liquid and blue, these figures of bad reputation - especially dangerous for young boys and heroes – are rehabilitated and reinterpreted thanks to the meeting of Leggendaria with the Milan "Melusine" group, tells us Nadia Tarantini. A cultural association founded by over 20 years ago inspired by the work of Maria Ginbutas, the Melusine group deals with research on topics of archeology of the imagination, spirituality and women's poetry. With publications, conferences and exhibitions it deepens and disseminates the archeology of women's imaginary taking its name from a siren of Celtic mythology.
From here originate many suggestions proposed in this issue's section Tema, that dig up the origins of myths and offer alternative views. The prototypes and roles derived from mermaids will make you feel spoilt for choice in a wide range of titles that in the reading section Letture include also audio-books and artworks, such as the watercolours by Adriana Assini, who is also a quite renonwned writer.
Una famiglia perfetta”by the well-known italo-swiss writer Silvia Ricci Lempen and Tutta mio padree by Rosa Matteucci are but two suggestions by Maria Vittoria Vittori, who enjoys summer as the season par excellence when we have to deal with our family and its – sometimes destabilizing – relations.
But if you'd rather feel like travelling without moving, why not indulge in the exotic Asian landscapes and plots of Amruta Patil's Nel cuore di smog city, or Samina Ali's Un giorno di pioggia a Madras, as suggested by Riccardo Capoferro and Paola Zoppi respectively?
Indeed, if you need to keep your luggage light, then Anna Maria Crispino's advice is perfect for you: why not choose among intriguing audio-books – such as Milena Agus' Mal di pietre, an european best-seller, or a classic work like Natalia Ginzburg's Le piccole virtù read by the actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno? A slim but intense volume, like Orti insorti by Elena Guerrini or Anne Sexton's Una come lei e altre poesie will also keep your luggage light, but with a promise you won't be able to wait until you open your suitcase.
Figurative art is central in the Primo Piano section, presenting Linda Bertelli's and Massimiliano Tognetti's two-voices review of the exhibition held at the Rome National gallery of modern art "Donna, Avanguardia femminista negli anni '70".
Art is also a keyword in the A margine section, that highlights the "Io ho diritto, I have right, J'ai le droit" solidarity event held last April in Rome with the participation of the multimedia FemaleCut artists in support of AIDOS, the Italian Association for women in development.

The Leggendaria summer issue closes offering its readers the opportunity to enjoy  a bautiful short story on their deckchair: A very special greeting with a very special tale by Itala Vivan, telling of a girl crossing America with her Fiat 500 in the '60s.

LEGGENDARIA N. 81
“TERRE-MUTATE”

52 pages, special price 6 euros

The May 2010 issue is a monograph entirely focused on L'Aquila, the April 6th 2009 earthquake occurred in Abruzzo and the reaction of women survivors in the region one year after the disaster.

There was and there is - still - a city with an article in its name. A strong name, a feminine name. L'Aquila: the Eagle. The city of 99 fountains and, one year after the earthquake, many facets. Leggendaria looks at it through the eyes of its women.

Easter was a few days away, at dawn of April 6th, one year ago. The lament of shawled women bent in the rubble reminded one of passion, as in Matthew's version by Pasolini. Just like Mary in the black and white scene in the Apennines was left with a body, so were the women of L'Aquila, while crosses and corpses littered the lawn of the magnificent Collemaggio church.
Yet the women of L'Aquila are still trying to do the miracle. Every day.

Rated 5.8 on the Richter scale, the earthquake had its epicentre in the Abruzzo town and surrounding villages – 308 people are known to have died. Approximately 40 thousands were made homeless and found accommodation in tented camps; another 10 thousands were housed in hotels on the coast.
Controversies on reconstruction works, criminality and political interests in the mountain-ringed capital of Abruzzo repeatedly hit the news while, 14 months after the disaster, there was still no comprehensive plan for the restoration of the city's historical centre. Nonetheless the city is back to life.
The women of L'Aquila are doing the miracle - every day.

Restoration started at school, reports Luciana Di Mauro in her article “La scuola nostra seconda casa”, with plenty of memories collected from teachers, head-masters and local officials. It was thanks to teachers like Luisa Nardecchia, who took over the lessons in tents or in the MUSP, (provisional school buildings) that the school was the first (and only) soon fully operative institution: On 21st September 2009 all schools had reopened – either in the renovated old buildings which had suffered only minor damage or in the MUSP.

Culture was and still is at the core of the city in all its facets, as one realises reading about the new cultural projects ranging from music to theatre to art in its wider sense. Indeed, the exodus, the inconvenience, and nomadism have not silenced one of the most musical Italian cities. So orchestras and choirs are out again, touring the country, while L'Aquila's auditorium reminds one of a seismograph of hope – as in the September 6th 2009 concert conducted by Riccardo Muti, tell us Matilde Passa and Ursula Vagnozzi in their endearing testimonies on today's cultural scene in the city.

Maria Rosaria La Morgia in her “Diario aquilano” gives evidence that all the information from below also seems to be beating to an attentive collective rhythm in L'Aquila: websites, blogs and small local televisions have been witnesses to both the rebuilding and to the ghost town. To restoration and resistance with efforts through precariousness and the strength to start again. Creative generosity has voiced pain and complaints when victims fell among the cranes and the photographers, as on a modern day Mount Calvary.

Some seem to know a lot about it. This is the case with the mayor of L'Aquila, Massimo Cialente, interviewed by Luciana Di Mauro. The representative of the citizens of the capital and its surroundings, propped behind the stage of the town's still off-limits centre does a lot of talking with and about his fellow citizens. All united and simultaneously divided by an individual/collective “before and after the earthquake”. They share a temporary city where the drama continues alongside with hope: momentum to rebuild came from the young and still receives impulse from them, as the main local needs evidenced by the mayor are financial aid, working conditions, restoration and public spaces for young people.

The former President of the province, Silvia Pezzopane, with whom Nadia Tarantini spent a whole day discussing past political defeats and new challenging projects, is a strong woman sharing a similar focus on young people and the strength of cultural associations.

As in a symbolic image of this tragedy – reflecting a cracked government building with little left to support, emblematic photographs illustrate the May issue in frames that run parallel to the words: nuns and concrete mixers, coffins and children, keys without doors and gates without walls.
Houses without families.
A house without its family. A family without their house are at the core of the final story by Mariastella Lippolis “Letto matrimoniale”. One turns the final pages on her characters trying to reconquer their house. Let them be, away from the eyes of all, in a subtle fragrance of coffee in the narrow streets of a deserted city.

LEGGENDARIAA n. 80

"Virus: Sex, Money and Power"

76 pages, 10 euros

The March 2010 issue focuses on news reports of Italian sex scandals  involving call girls, transgender people, showgirls and young political candidates exchanging sex for money and favours from and among powerful people and politicians. It lasted a whole year and it might go on and on… The consequent devaluation of women reduced to mere "body" and goods to swap in men’s relations are analysed along with the use of sexist language.

Leggendaria’s Tema section opens with Bia Sarasini’s perspective on reports of how such scandals have been told, highlighting that Italian media now follow the television technique of serial narrative to report politics and refer to their audience as if they were a passive public instead of aware citizens and voters. The phenomenon is further confirmed by Monica Luongo’s detailed analysis of the fading difference between public and private life, where the Italian media reporting about the protagonists of politics and real life have taken on the language of fiction. Accordingly, the very tag of “gossip” to refer to political sets and scandals is meaningless. Luongo’s contribution also looks back at the prediction published by Leggendaria (The world of Soap Operas) 16 years ago suggesting that sex, money and power would move from soap-operas to the limelight of news communication. The troubling anticipation is finally confirmed.
 
Indeed, much has changed through language: the 18 years old Noemi Letizia (presumed lover of the Prime Minister) and many others have told Italians about their “difficult” career choice: show-girl or member of the European Parliament? Plenty of quotations from TV and magazine interviews filled with technical communication terms, sex terms and details which make the news similar to a CSI episode signal not only that TV stars are invited to take part in the writing of the school system reform or other important  political decisions, but also that language has played a most significant role in the process.
 
This is why Maria Pia Ercolini stops to analyse the unaware and/or uncontrolled use of language in politics. Ercolini’s intent is to remind us that words and language should be used rigorously. And that when they are not, as is the case under investigation, loose ties give way to prejudice, hypocrisy and a subsequent lack of democracy. Ercolini reaches back to old Greek to stress the concept and show the Italian language still lacks equal opportunities. Ancient Greek women did not have political rights thus there was no feminine for the word “polites” (citizen). But we do enjoy political rights nowadays, so why do Ms Polverini (just voted as governor of Lazio region) and her colleagues insist on referring to their audiences with the masculine gender only – appealing to “cittadini”, “futuri presidenti” and even end up being appointed “ministro”? Ercolini’s thesis is the asymmetric use of Italian conceals the (political) will of men’s supremacy, which other countries have long overcome, as is the case in Spain and the USA to name a few. Quotations and examples are not intended to win the debate, which is still interesting and open for both quiet and shrill voices.
One of them is offered space in the interview to Cecilia Robustelli by Loredana Cornero, proposing “recommendations” for a non-sexist use of the Italian language. Robustelli, a member of the EU Directorate General for Translation (DG), marks a difference in the term “feminine gender” specifying that apart from the grammar issue, it is now time to take into account the socio-cultural evolution which has brought about considerable changes in many once men-only professions. According to the European DG monitoring of sexist language in official papers, Robustelli confirms that France, Austria, Switzerland and Spain are more aware and sensitive than Italy in language gender issues.

Leggendaria n. 80 then proceeds with further in-depth about the image of women in Italian politics as derived from the above-mentioned phenomena and poses a central question: Italian women involved in the scandals are victims or conscious “actresses” on the scene? The floor goes to Giancarla Cordignani, professor of classical literature, journalist, former member of Parliament and political expert. Cordignani’s appeal to women, that she still considers a minority, is not to give up: When things get tough, tough women get going, even when the political scene is discouraging – (on both sides of the Parliament). Women must take part in building democracy and be the protagonists of change. The appeal to a wider participation in political life, institutions, education and health system, along with a firm resistance against discouragement and stereotypes is shared by other contributors to the current issue. Women’s participation is strongly exemplified in Luciana di Mauro’s reportage on  the women of L’Aquila (with photos by Nicoletta Bardi). The contribution witnesses the effort of women (and men) one year after the terrible earthquake that devastated Abruzzo and anticipates a Special issue by Leggendaria on the theme coming out in June.

In the Antologia section a not-to-be-missed review by Maria Grosso’s of “The Hurt Locker” – the off the mark and disturbing film by Katherine Bigelow that has been awarded 6 Oscars for denouncing “war is a drug”. Obsessive, repetitive, disturbing, It is a film where the lives of Iraqi victims, lavishly remunerated volunteers and American soldiers mix and the unsuspected sensitivity of a military man untangles the wires of death looming over people and places; where unexpected delicate protection is able to oppose the unbearable military pressure that annihilates human beings.
 
In the frame of a wider production, this issue’s first part of the Speciale – complete with pictures and interview - is dedicated to Kym Ragusa, the important Italian-Afro-American independent film-director and writer – author of The Skin Between Us (published in Italy by Nutrimenti), which won the John Fante 2009 award. Her work is a tribute to beauty in its wider sense – not only of bodies but also of gestures and details. The journey unwinds from Harlem to Messina and back, in a lyrical tale of love, rage, abandonment and returns. The second part of the Speciale, by Caterina Romeo, introduces “Padri”, the Italian-American “memoir” on father figures edited by Anna Maria Crispino, (and translated by Clara Antonucci). A little collection of three Italian-American writers, Ned Balbo, Carol Bonomo Albright and Edvige Giunta, who tell of their father figures looking both to the past and to the future. Three stories centred on different places, walks of life, lives but all giving voice to a rich Italian-American contemporary literature speaking of “inbetweenness”, i.e. the formation of identities in the complexity of different cultures that meet in a human being.

The Primopiano section opens with Rosanna Fiocchetto’s review of Nadia Agustoni’s “Taccuino Nero”, her latest collection of poems set in the life of factory workers. Industrial settings and margins open up to the secret garden of poetry, but they do so without overindulging in the language of the working-class and in a style that is not typically feminine. Federica Tourn comments on Ragazze Irresistibili, a research conducted by Ferdinanda Vigliani on female role models offered by magazines for teenagers. Sponsored by the Equal Opportunities Commission of the Piedmont Region, the study confirms the magazines quality is low, information is lacking and stereotypes are sadly trite: Teenagers are still offered the model of a passive woman ahead of her rivals in the competition of beauty and charm to win a boyfriend. Matilde Passa examines Raffaella di Castro’s philosophical research on the moral duty of remembering the Holocaust for the third-generation Jews who are now in their 30 or 40. Children and grandchildren of survivors, people who were not born yet and for whom di Castro’s questions the value of memory of tragedies not lived. Matilde Passa’s review of Iréne Cohen-Janca’s book dedicated to Anne Frank’s tree is a further token of remembrance to victims of the Holocaust, while Maristella Lippolis closes the Primopiano section presenting Luciana Percovich’s latest work on cosmogonic myths, which share a feminine principle in the origin of life and control of the universe.

In the Letture section, reviews of the latest books by Piera Mattei, Norma Huidobro, Isabel Allende, Carol Shields, Angela Padrone, Mercè Rodoreda, Fred Vargas and the first surprising book by Italian singer Teresa de Sio.
 

LEGGENDARIA n. 79

"Le Prof" 

76 pages, 9 euros

The 79th edition of Leggendaria (February 2010), is dedicated to the ongoing crisis of the Italian education system in the light of the latest reform by Mariastella Gelmini, the Italian Minister for Education, and its repercussions on women.
Leggendaria’s focus offers a review of teaching as the main modern professional achievement and liberation for women: albeit not thoroughly “intellectual”-  around the second half of the XIX century teaching became one of their main opportunities of enjoying a non-manual work, then having a flywheel effect in their liberation and providing them with the opportunity of gaining economic independence.
A central claim in this issue is that current cuts to the Italian education system are taking us all backwards, but women in particular. Its is a fact, though often ignored even by the media, that in Italy the majority of teachers are women.
They could therefore be facing decline as a consequence of the deprivation of their “equal opportunities”  − with poorer women being the victims in the process – where “poorer” means those with a lower income, less freedom and less opportunities of choice. In their role of precarious primary and secondary school teachers, young Italian women will be most exposed to the drastic cuts in education. Moreover, statistics show that in Italy women study harder and with better results than men; in this light, it is foreseeable they will also suffer more from the general worsening of the education system, also resulting in crowded classrooms and incidental decrease of teaching quality.
Along with teachers, it’s mothers - especially working mothers – who will bear the burden of reduced full-time school attendance, and, in some cases, of the unification of schools.
The Tema section “Le Prof” (short for “women teachers” used by the youngest) is edited by Simona Bonsignori, who offers a  wide perspective on the issue, complete with state-of-the-art information, a collection of data and evidences, as well as careful and unusual considerations. A final reflection is dedicated to the Italian school as represented in novels, films and TV shows. Unbelievable as it may seem, thanks to teachers’ passion and dedication, the final picture depicts a rich and articulated school world, where not all is lost yet, however distant institutions may be in their perennially twisted relation to real life.
 
The extensive Primopiano section opens with the review by Maria Vittoria Vittori of “Corrispondersi”; a volume of correspondence between women of intellect who entrusted their passions to letters. Love letters, poems, literary suggestions, travel memories and delicate emotions come to light in the book edited by Clotilde Barbarulli and Monica Farnetti for Centro-ideazione-donna del Giardino dei Ciliegi (Florence). The collection makes us sympathize with French artist Camille Claudet writing to her mother from her confinement in a psychiatric hospital; with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; Sibilla Aleramo and Lina Poletti, to name a few.
Writing about literature is the core of a peculiar case reviewed by Martina Piperno in Biancamaria Frabotta’s “Quartetto per masse e voce sola” and Giulio Ferroni’s “La passion predominante”. Former colleagues enjoying literary encounters and interests, each quotes the other though style and concepts are remarkably different. Maria Grazia Furnari’s extensive review of books on food centre on one common feature, i.e. the fact that besides being a personal issue, food is also a political instrument: the expression  of choice and responsibility as well as a medium to transmit one's cultural identity and values.
The legal condition of women and lack of democracy in Europe, with an account of current rights evolved via international charters and political changes is the work by the researcher Mariagrazia Rossilli, presented in this issue of Leggendaria by Laura Moschini, professor of Social ethics at Roma3 University, while Silvia Neonato leads us through the pages of new publications on love and passion: for nature, men, and pets. The section continues with Maria Grosso relating Simone Bitton's documentary on Rachel Corrie's death in Gaza. The portrait of a young American – a woman and a militant of ISM (International Solidarity Movement) “accidentally” killed in her endeavour to diffuse peace. A death occurred in 2003 which the USA have not investigated yet.
In reviewing Iaia Caputo's “Le donne non invecchiano mai”, Silvia Neonato poses the issue of the dictatorship of the body in the modern Western world, where we strain to cope with the passing of time and the loss of beauty. The Italian writer and journalist investigates time as a gender issue claiming elderly women should raise their stakes and imitate men in allowing themselves to use intelligence, power and money as means of seduction.
Women’s body as a poetical focus, complete with birth, death, cancer, is Loredana Magazzeni’s presentation of “Corporea. Il corpo nella poesia femminile contemporanea in lingua inglese”,  a collection of international contemporary women poets eventually translated into Italian. Both translators and poets agree it's time these words - long deemed too dirty for literature - find their place in poetry publications.
Marisa Ombra reviews Marisa Rodano's recent diary (2 volumes). A question remains open if still today it’s politics that “chooses” its women and not the other way round. The diary tells the life of a woman activist where details of international politics mingle with personal memories, such as breast-feeding in Parliament because missing the session was not allowed. Love defies death in the closing chapter devoted to former husband Franco Rosano. Mariella Gramaglia suggests we read Leda Colombini's biography written by the Italian historian F. Piva: a lower-class child in the 1930's, Leda was chosen by the Communist Party to attend a vocational course in Milan. Culture and college changed her life. But the ever-vigilant - and masculine - eye of the Party blamed women for being too sentimentally rather than politically bound. The section closes with Anna Maria Crispino's invitation to enjoy Marisa Ombra's biography: a feminist born in the 1920's, she took part to the Italian Resistance movement, was a leading member of the Italian Communist Party, and much more. The book is suggested as a very pleasant but sober and not too sentimental read.

The February selection of must-reads – Letture - as usual, recommends and comments on a number of recent publications by, among others the emblem of the Jazz age Zelda Fitzgerald's “Lasciami l'ultimo valzer”, “Armori” by journalist and feminist Elena Scotti, “In viaggio con la zia” by the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews. Sara Poletto's suggestions for this issue include the Italian researcher on social studies Daniela Danna's recent essay “Stato di famiglia. Le donne maltrattate di fronte alle istituzioni” and a few books for teen-agers, such as “Il giorno che cambiò la mia vita” by Cesare Finzi, “A vederla non si direbbe” by Silvana D'Angelo and “Viva la libertà” by Luisa Mattia.
Sara Bennet invites us to enjoy “La porta chiusa”, the latest novel by the Norwegian thriller writer Anne Holt. Last but not least, Maria Vittoria Vittori proposes Hillary Belle Walker’s first novel “Case altrui” and Gabriella Musetti’s suggestion is dedicated to “Non restate in silenzio”, the invitation of the writer and teacher of creative, functional and academic writing Adriana Lorenzi to trust words and one’s urgency to write and tell.
 
The centre page of the closing section Under 15 is occupied by Sara Bennet’s review of two entertaining books revisiting classic fairy-tales (such as Little Red Riding Hook and The Little Mermaid): Benoit Jacques’ “Aprite quella porta!” and Gita Wolf Sirish Rao’s “Il volo della sirenetta”. A must-read for both young and adults. In the Cibo e parole section Sara Poletto proposes Graziella Martina’s “Il mio apprendistato in cucina. Le ricette di Colette” and Elisabetta Tiveron’s “Pippi Calzelunghe piccola grande cuoca”, two amusing books for young women trying their hand at cooking who will find in these reads the pleasure of narrating about food, a true blend of imagination, ingredients and literature. Good news eventually come from Giulia Crispino’s advice to visit www.editoriaragazzi.it, the new Italian portal dedicated to children’s literature. Presented at the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin, the website includes the most comprehensive Italian database in the field and aims at promoting children’s reading nationwide.

LEGGENDARIA N. 77/78

"Women's talent" 

+ 24 pages Strenne

12 euro

Leggendaria 77/78 comes with an attractive 24 page book-review supplement with numerous suggestions for books to give for Christmas presents. The main issue’s theme is ‘Women’s Talent’ and it is beautifully illustrated with images by Silvia Manazza.

The long ‘Tema’ section by Nadia Tarantini follows, in her words, a zig-zag path, ‘as if the various pieces were hyper-links on a web-page.’ This reflects, she feels, the way women’s talent works: multitasking and creating networks, all the articles agree, are the most important talent women have. Women’s talent is often hidden, Tarantini claims. In the home, in the caring professions, in a different way of interpreting power relations. The real talent, therefore, is for women to come out from underground and express their creativity, becoming protagonists of their own life as well as that of others. The ‘Tema’ section interrogates women of talent, as well as younger women who contemplate talented women of the generation before them, with three basic questions: What is the most important talent for a woman? Which talent is most important at this point in history? Finally, which talent is the most important for you? As many of the subsequent articles confirm, the most precious talent is ‘the talent of living’.

In an interveiw with Luisella Veroli, curator of the prehistoric art exhibition ‘Before Eve’, Tarantini asks Veroli about the symbolism of the name of her women’s cultural association. ‘Melusine’ were midwives, and thus an archetype of women’s wisdom which literally helps bring people to life: ‘goddesses of the dawn’ as Veroli calls them. On the same topic, Giusi Di Crescenzo reports on this year’s visit to Italy by Vicki Noble, an American faith healer and researcher in the California Institute of Integral Studies. As well as lecturing in Italy, Noble researches local rituals with signs of pre-patriarchal rites, such as the procession in Abruzzo where women carry snakes just out of hibernation. Four other associations with similar agendas are listed (www.librerialesorgenti.com; www.centroabalon.it; www.miladonnambiente.org; and www.starhawk.org.

Laura Fortini likens women’s literature to the category of novel described by Gadda as “cretinous”, that is “fresh, puerile, mythical, oniric, symbolic, innocent and ingenuous.” Women’s ‘underground’ nature, Fortini writes, can be seen as either a form of detachment from the literary canons of the day, or else as innocence. But certainly not as superficiality. Women’s writing is hard to define in one category, because, as Kristeva commented, it “reveals, in a new way, the incommensurability of the single.”
Tarantini goes on to explore why previous generations of women writers are so important as models. The writer Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, in her journal ‘Tuttestorie’, provides an answer when she writes: “If you feel you are an exception, if you feel you are alone, you don’t have the chance to assimilate your experience and face your writing in a new way.” Tradition valorizes and gives force to experimentation. And yet, Tarantini is dismayed to related, Italian women writers are never mentioned in the anthologies and the  official literary history of the country. Now that most (western) women have the Woolfian essentials for writing (a room, good health, and money), we no longer have an excuse for not writing  We need to ‘authorize ourselves to write’, says Tarantini. Natalie Goldberg lists 25 impediments to writing in a normal day. The conclusion is that there is no perfect situation; you need to train yourself to be flexible and simply write, write, write.
Anna Maria Crispino looks at the relationship between cooking and writing. Virginia Woolf was the least domestic woman one could imagine, but apparently she was good at baking bread. Women generally don’t write by isolating themselves, Crispino observes. The particular talent of women writers is to include and not separate, concentrate without abstracting themselves, take care of themselves without giving up on the small pleasures of life and without neglecting their duties to others.
Together, Crispino and Tarantini survey women’s answers to the three basic questions concerning women’s talent, revealing a panorama of different answers with a common theme: the capacity of women to re-invent life and to look at things in a new way. Anna Maria Mori puts it very well: “It’s a talent I would define as Mozartian. To intuit all the terribleness of life and yet embrace it just the same. Above all it’s an explosion of happiness, of beauty, of lightness, of colour.” The talent of women is to manage to rewrite the world taking account of their own experience, and not necessarily taking into account the male point of view. At the same time, their concrete, pragmatic approach to life has the potential to save the world from indifference and resignation. Women want a future and one way to do this is to build a new civic sense to combat the stark individualism of today’s dominant cultural model. Finally, an element that characterizes women’s talent is their ability to celebrate even under difficult circumstances, to face life and death with courage, dignity and curiosity.
Young scholars Livia Alga, Francesca Bonsignori, Emi Guarda and Claudia Bruno remind us that the Greek etymology of the word ‘talent’ is, twofold: on the one hand, suffering, and the ability to take the weight of the world on ones’ shoulders, and, on the other, courage, insolence and daring. In Greek mythology, a person with talent suffers terrible hardship, bears the weight of his responsibility, tenaciously opposes difficulty with unbounded resistance and succeeds in overcoming it. Another Indoeuropean, Greek and Roman etymology refers to weighing and weights, and subsequently, value and money.
Tarantini asks younger women what a talented woman is in their view, what talents they prefer in women from previous generations, and what talent best represents women of their generation. They answer in chorus that the talent that their generation shares is that of adapting, multi-tasking, living more than one life at the same time, each with passion. What younger women appreciate in their mothers and grandmothers is the courage of their actions; the courage to take on responsibility and the courage to remain unaware of its consequences. Today’s most appreciated talent, in the view of the younger women interviewed, is acrobatism: “creativity and cultural tightropewalking”, together with the capacity to have a dream, despite all the difficulties.
In her article, tv-producer Franca Fossati stresses how important it is not to bury women’s talents. Women are essential in the workplace and in contributing to the cultural climate because they know how to work within complexity and how to maintain more than one dimension. They also have the talent of empathy, conflict resolution, and problem-solving.
Film-director Lorella Reale interviews Sandra Chiarato about a new initiative to encourage women entrepreneurs in agriculture, local food production, and distribution to network more effectively in order to fight new global and genetically-modified trends. Monica Giovannoni addresses another sector in which women need to invest more of their talent: high-tech and Information Technology. A country’s future wealth and adaptability to new work patterns depends on its human capital, of which the creative class make up the most important segment. In the same vein, physician Francesca Gorini talks about the few Italian women inventers and innovators, who have organized themselves into an association called ITWIIN. A Milan meeting in August 2009 awarded the ITWIIN prize to Roberta Martinetti and Daniela Rader, while the collateral prize was given to Alessandra Luchini and Barbara Santoro.
Luciana Di Mauro reports from Barhein where women are beginning to take on more responsibility in politics. Princess Mei Al-Khalifa, Bahrein’s Minister of Information and Culture, shows a common learning curve: once her children were grown up, she went back to university and then wrote seven history books about her country, becoming a cultural manager in her own right. Di Mauro comments that the Princess does not wear a veil, while 95 percent of Bahreini women do.
Pascale Voilley reveals the extraordinary story of Victoria Woodhull, a woman candidate for the US Presidency as far back as 1872 who fought for minority representation, the abolition of the death penalty and of poverty, universal health care, national education, legislation to limit stock-market speculation and free love. This dynamic figure could have changed the entire course of American history, but she was too subversive for her time, and was arrested on the night of the elections for sending ‘obscene’ mail. The male establishment was safe for another century or so.
Lia Giachero writes about women’s talents being ‘vampirized’ by home life and, in particular, over-riding love. Quoting from Grandes’s ‘Atlas of Human Geography’, Giachero comments on the idea that for women, “sleeping alone is like having nothing.” Women are more subject to this form of self-sacrifice, Kay Swift, the musician and composer, says, because “they are incurable romantics”. Women who reject married life and children, in the hope of saving themselves from this loss of creativity, however, are not always immune, as Hilda Doolitle’s life shows. Strong, independent women who manage their creative lives with a fist of iron fare no better, and are often fragile and sentimental. Frida Kahno’s love for Rivera was more important even than her amputated leg: “I hope still to be useful to him,” she writes.Finally, women who adopt a male stance and masculine modes of behaviour often fall into the trap of sex, acohol or drug addiction.
Bollywood or Hollywood – it makes no difference. Women directors are few and far between in both hives of film production, Angela Prudenzi writes. In Italy, there were once figures such as Elvira Notari, who founded Elvira films in 1905 in Naples, and Ida Lupino, equivalent perhaps to todays’s Jodie Foster: actress, producer and director. Film critic Cristina Paternò completes the concept with an article on Jane Campion’s production in general and on her new film, ‘Bright Star’, based on the love affiar between Fanny Browne and the poet John Keats.
Tv reporter Ritanna Armeni, reviews ‘Elles’, the Centre Pompidou exhibition in Paris containing 500 pieces of art, design, literature, graphics and photographs exclusively by women. Since at the Metropolitan only 3 percent of the art works on display are by women, while 93 percent of the nudes on show are female, it is clear, Armeni comments, that this show is unsettling. In tiny doses, women’s talent is bearable, she concludes,  but women’s genius is still not entirely palatable.
Writer Maristella Lippolis explores her reaction to three children’s stories that were very influential in her upbringing: ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘The Little Princess’, and Hector Malot’s ‘In the Family’. While ‘Little Women’ provided a ready-made set of models of behaviour, among which Jo represented the adventurous, spirited rebel, the girls in the other novels were less obviously depicted as models. Mary Lennox and Sara Crewe were both misfits, shy and odd. What they had in common that fascinated and fired Lippoli’s imagination was their curiosity, their fantasy, and the courage to change their situations.
Music critic Matilde Passa depicts the early life and later career of the two singers, Maria Callas and Maria Malibran. The latter was born to a famous tenor and forced from an early age into a musical career, while the former was born to a humble Greek chemist in New York, and the family had every reason to resist her artistic calling. What they shared, Passa decides, is their exclusive devotion to their art, to the extent that their lives were marred, and in both cases ended early. As Starobinski commented, their’s was a sort of ‘excessus vitae’, from the Latin ‘exit from life’. An excessive dedication to their voice to the exclusion of every other aspect of their lives.
Different voices, different music: young festival organizer Elisa Cocco looks a the common ground among Gianna Nannini, Madonna and Beth Ditto. Madonna, the ‘barbie of the videogeneration’, the ‘butch’ Italian rockstar, icon for lesbians, feminists and rock fans, and the overweight, but cleverly marketed, Beth Ditto, embody a new way of conceiving the relationship between art and the star system. They are all fully aware of what is required of them by the market, and they play with it using ambiguity and provocation, dosing themselves carefully and creating a post-modern mix of desire and fear.
The International Women’s House in Rome was the site of a series of installations this summer, by Alhena and Femmenthal, with its ‘Women in boxes’ illustrated in this issue of Leggendaria.

A brief political comment concludes the section. Why have women reacted so docilely to the recent sexual scandals in Italian politics? , the piece asks. Why has there not been an outcry about the humiliation of women in the public sphere, especially considering the shameful position on a world scale regarding representation of women in politics?

In Chiara Turozzi’s article in the ‘Speciale’ section, ‘Animal or Mineral?’, female and animal archetypes are explored and illustrated with Rosa Maria Grella’s photos inspired by nature. Plato stated that, if they behaved badly, men would be reborn  in the form of women, and that later lives would take the form of animals. In this concept, the female form is considered inferior, and animals one step further down the scale. Both forms are considered ‘primitive’, closer to their origins, slaves both to a natural cycle and to the ability to give birth. The theme of animals in literature is further illustrated by Claudia Patuzzi with a collection of annotated extracts from novels where animals play a part. Authors include: Yourcenar, Manzini, Ortese, Mattei, Morante, and Byatt, The ‘Mineral’ section of the ‘Speciale’ is a piece by Ana Pizarro describing how the geographical surroundings she grew up in have influenced her way of writing and her very nature. The vulcanic nature of her native country, Chile, has taught her the “forms of her existence,” while water has always made her dream of a magic city at the bottom of a river, the idea of another possibility in life.

The ‘Primo Piano’ section reviews a history of Venice edited by Tiziana Plebani, seen from the point of view of generations of women (Monica Luongo); poetry written to be set to music by Ida Travi on the theme of the myth of Alcesti (Maria Clelia Cardona); and a new Italian film directed by Donatella Maiorca called ‘Viola di Mare’ (Pina Mandolfo). The section closes with news of two new associations. One groups women in the media from the Mediterranean rim who hope to raise awareness of the need for greater representation (see www.copeam.irg), reported by Loredana Cornero. The other combats Female Genital Mutiliation among immigrant women in Italy (see www.aurora-iono.it ).

LEGGENDARIA N.76
“The Women’s smile”

82 pag, 10 euro

The September 09 Leggendaria ironically poses the questions: do women have a sense of humour, or, as men tend to claim, are they dominated by ‘the humours’? Are women allowed to laugh and make others laugh, or should they limit their role to smiling pleasantly?

The opening section is devoted to this year’s edition of the Turin Festival of Spirituality (sponsored in part by Leggendaria), whose theme this year was ‘Dis-enchantment’. In her article related to the Festival’s theme, Bia Sarasini attempts to identify the origins of what she calls the ‘ideological project’ that has driven Italian television, in particular, to privilege appearance over reality in its representation of women. Quoting Lorella Zanardo’s documentary  ‘The Body of Women’ (www.corpodelledonne.blogspot.com), Sarasini concludes that women viewers are so innured to the images they do not even see the humiliation underlying their representation.

Anna Maria Crispino interviews the philosopher Elena Pulcini on the book she presented at the Festival, ‘Taking Care of the World. Fear and Responsibility in a Global Era’ (2009). Pulcini declares that more than ever‘we need women thinkers who think big’. In this direction, she considers her books ‘little trojan horses’ because, as she claims, it is ‘essential at this time that we pose new questions regarding what image of the world we want to cultivate.’

Laura Corradi reviews three pieces from the Naples Theatre Festival (June 2009): Miriam Palma and Lina prosa’s show ‘Il Gattopardo’, the punk performer Angela Barretta’s ‘Pharmacon’, and Massimiliano Virgilio’s ‘Porn-all-day’. All three represent instances of self-abuse seen as both an accusation and pleasure, or what the Black Panther Angela Davis called ‘internalised oppression’.

The Tema section edited by Daniela Carpisassi looks at irony from many points of view. Gallieno’s theory of ‘humours’ described women’s bodies as cold, pale, fluid, fragile, and lacking in energy compared to men’s bodies. Throughout history women have been considered unsuited to the act of laughing and inappropriate if they make others laugh. Laughing women were considered incontinent; a wide-open mouth was indecent. Open lips were abhorred as being licentious. A gaping hole was seen as dangerous to men; it incorporated the risk of castration. With the advent of feminism came the question: effectively, what is there to laugh about in women’s lives?

Judith Stora-Sandor jokingly asks why making people laugh is the prerogative of men. Historically, the only woman to laugh openly was the biblical figure Sara when, in the Old Testament, she learned that she was to bear a child at the age of eighty. This, of course, was taken to be an act of insolence. It wasn’t until Jane Austen that a woman writer could be ironic – as long as she remained ‘pleasant’ at the same time. A couple more centuries and we have the comic (and less ‘nice’) authors Dorothy Parker, Helen Fielding and others; even these, however, are often relegated to the ‘chick-lit category and not taken seriously. If women have so little sense of humour, Stora-Sandor wonders, why have men wasted their funny stories on them for so long?

Marisa Forcina reviews Luisa Muraro’s latest book ‘At the Market of Happiness’ where, she recommends, we should all go in order to learn to recognise that it is not material comfort but desire that animates us. In order to make informed choices, Muraro states, irony is an essential tool because it ‘makes the spirit vigilant, tollerant, and willing to verify’ the truth.

Silvie Duverger, in her article ‘Not all angels sit at the hearth’, quotes Virginia Wolf who said that for centuries  women were the “looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women’s irony, Duverger comments, “never stops trying to deconstruct the rhetoric of bad faith that justifies patriarchal exploitation.”

Caterina Romeo reviews the 2005 short-story collection with the rather unfortunate title, given the collection’s aim, of ‘Black Sheep’. Women migrants living in Italy, with very different origins are brought together by a shared use of irony, sarcasm and humour in order to create a certain detachment in their writing.

Marina Mizzau humourously explores the drawbacks of being single in a world where the couple and the family are the dominant models. Simple problems such as scratching your back or booking a hotel room become the symptom of a greater malaise: that of not fitting in with the way society has programmed us to be.

An ironic blog from a writer who calls herself ‘Ilaria la Precaria’ opens the section on today’s new generation of workers – especially women - with no rights. Gabriella Rossi in her article that follows the blog entry, comments on the fact that, yes, these new workers invent ten new jobs a day, and yes, they get by, but where is the stability needed in order to establish a sense of dignity, self-confidence, and assurance, never mind have a family? The only way to survive, Rossi concludes, is to don a permanent comic mask, hiding the tears of anger and frustration that occasionally mar the good humour.

Nadia Setti proposes a “comic-serious recipe book” for maintaining one’s ‘relationship with joy, with art, and with the profound knowledge that accompanies us when we are happy.’ Quoting from Elsa Morante’s  ‘popular song’ called ‘The World Saved by Children’, Setti considers the protagonist, a young madman known as the ‘pazzariello’, an important archetypical figure. Morante, in fact, divided the world into the few who were happy and the many who were not.

Alessandra Racca claims in her article that it is best not to take oneself too seriously if one wants to send a serious message. People have more empathy for those who are the object of irony, she claims. In her blog she writes ironically about sex, not, she insists, in order to corner the market, but because she feels strongly that the more women manage to talk about it, the more they will free themselves of their hang-ups.

The Irony Anthology section presents a chronological, commentated and annotated series of texts concerning women, irony and humour, starting with Caterina of Siena in 1370 and finishing with Patrizia Cavalli (2008).

In an ironic overview of the Italian (and Roman) feminist movement since the earliest collectives in the 70s, Federica Paoli explores its journalistic and literary production. Being underground, she claims, is our ‘political continuity.’ Irony, sense of self, positivity, and joy “together give body to the great force that women represent.”

Mira Falardeau explores the role of women political cartoonists in Quebec, where satire was alive and well as far back as the pioneering ‘Charivari Canadien’ in 1844 and ‘Punch’ in 1879, but where women satirists have had to struggle to gain a foothold and be published in male-run media outlets. Women satirical cartoonists even today are not forerunners in the cartoon ‘market’, and tend to be relegated to women’s publications, the web, or, more recently, the autobiographical, intimate cartoon novel, where humour plays only a marginal role. There is hope in the website www.cartooningforpeace.org, Flardeau claims. Anna Maria Ctispino adds her comment on Italian cartoonists, giving pride of place to Leggendaria’s Lori whose contribution to the journal is everywhere apparent. Other women cartoonists she cites are Anni Barazzetti and Gabriella Poluzzi, whose work displays black humour at its best. There is no doubt, they all conclude: laughing is good for you. We could even coin a new version of the old saying: ‘A good laugh and an apple a dau, keep the doctor away’

The Chianciano Etruscan museum dedicates a whole wing to the daily life of Etruscan women. Unlike the Greeks and the Romans, Etruscan women played an important role in family, social and political affairs. Many of the artifacts on display, from more than 800 tombs, show their vital importance .Chianciano offers contemporary women in search of wellbeing a chance to have hot spring and mud baths, massages and much more under the umbrella of the website for women travellers www.benvenuteintoscana.it.

Elisa Coco reviews the second edition of the LGT film and short-cuts festival ‘Divergenti’. Violence is the central theme this year, with films documenting the violence against transexual and transgender prisoners in US jails (‘Cruel and Unusual’); breast-silicone pumping and its dangers in the Brazilian transexual community (‘Bombadeira’); the group solidarity of a group of Filipino transexuals in Israel (‘Paper Dolls’); and the ritualised role of the Khusra in Pakistan in the baptism of boys (‘Chan di Chummi’). The films shown have a common theme: the destabilising effect of transexualism on society, and how violence against these ‘outliers’ is heightened by immigration, marginalisation and clandestinity.

The ninth edition of Tekfestival 2009, was dedicated to the German film-maker Helke Sander, Maria Grosso writes, showing her new film, ‘The all-round reduced personality – Redupers’. The Tekfestival is an independent and socially committed film festival, with very little funding but a strong tradition in combating social norms and expectations and critiquing the dominant political climate.
The famous 1979 Italian documentary, ‘Un processo per stupro’ (A Trial for Rape’) was shown in the conviction that the film is still relevant today. As Luisella Cossu comments in her article in the ‘A Margine’ section, that the common practice of putting the victim on trial and the supporting role of the women in the rapist’s life are both elements of a male-dominated culture that are as prevalent today as they were in the 1970s.

In the ‘A Margine’ section, Federica Gramegna reports on the May 2009 Brussels conference organised by the International Federation of Journalists on ‘Ethics and Gender Equality in the Newsroom’. In the article Gramegna cites the latest Global Media Monitoring Project research on the role of women in world journalism which found that only 14% of political news is reported by women, and 20% of economics and finance, while ‘soft’ news is prevalently covered by women. The crystal ceiling is well in place in journalism, the research and the conference concluded.

Saverio De Luca comments on the second edition of the Sports Against Violence games organised by the association Nessunotocchiledonne (Let Nobody Touch Women). The games were staged in order to raise consciousness about domestic violence.

The ‘Primo Piano section explores the darker side of maternity: aspects which are usually taboo, such as unwanted pregnancies, depression, ‘bad mothers’ and women who never want to be mothers and are made to feel guilty by a society that promotes maternity as an ideal but does little to help mothers. Nadia Tarantini meets Perihan Magden, a Turkish writer and intellectual who has written about excessive, smothering motherhood in her new book published in Italian as ‘In fuga’ (Escaping’). Tarantini goes on to explore other ways in which women can rebel against the ‘commercial’ model of the ideal family. Carola Susani and Elena Stancanelli, as well as Paola Leonardi and Ferdinanda Vigliani have written books about mothers and non-mothers. The latter couple interview women who have chosen not to have children and they call them “special women.” “There are women who walk on coals”, Ferdinanda writes, “and others who have children.” Both of these “extreme” experiences scare her.

The section continues with a review of Marta Nussbaum’s new book, ‘The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future’ by Mariella Gramaglia. Explicitly referring to Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, Nussbaum describes India as representing two different civilizations within one nation: the conflict is between the part of the country that believes in the concepts of the melting pot and multiculturalism, and the other part of the country that uses religious and ethnic identity as a defining force in their lives.

Ambra Pirri reviews Tamar Pitch’s most recent book in Italian called ‘The Society of Prevention.’ In this book Pitch describes “how the imperative of prevention, in the name both of personal safety and public security, shapes contemporary policies and practices of social control, which in turn heavily impinge on how bodies are viewed and dealt with.”

Other reviews: Angela Nanetti’s new novel, Mistral, by Maria Grosso; an important study of teenage suicide by Anna Oliverio Ferraris, reveiwed by Marilena Menicucci, and a review by Maria Grosso again of a ‘diary’ written by Daniela Lucatti describing her daily interactions with Romany women – often the brunt of racism even among well-meaning liberals - attending a health clinic in Pisa during the 1990s. Maria Vittoria Vittori pays tribute to Luana O’Faolain who has recently died. Her posthumous book, ‘Best love, Rosie’ has recently been published in Italian.

The ‘Letture’ section, as usual, recommends and comments on a number of recent publications by, among others, Lidaia Ravera, the Chinese author Shan Sa, Claudia Priano, Angela Pneuman, the two Swedish thriller writers, Kjell Eriksson and Asa Larsson, Adriana Assini, the Cuban poet, critic and novelist, Lourdes Gonzalez Herrero, Maria Pace Ottieri, and Loretta Napoleoni.

LEGGENDARIA n. 75
“TRAVELLING”
84 pages, 10 euros

The May 2009 issue of Leggendaria, present at the Turin Book Fair, will help you choose what books to put in your suitcase for your summer reading.  Travelling – in all of its articulations - is its main theme. Its special feature is devoted to women thriller writers, with the intrusion of Stieg Larsson, who, nevertheless,  created one of the most assertive women protagonists in the genre.

Issue 75 opens with a tribute to a brave woman journalist who, together with Roberto Saviano, of “Gomorra” fame, and the magistrate Raffaele Cantone, has been condemned to death by the Naples-based organised crime syndicate, the Camorra.  An interview of Rosaria Capacchione by Anna Maria Crispino reveals the origins of her vocation as an investigative journalist: “If you live and work in Caserta, you can’t avoid the Camorra”. It helps, she confesses, that she hasn’t got a family. “It means I can make my own choices without involving others.” A piece by Mariella Gramaglia closes the interview, observing that, while even quietly heroic men like Saviano often tell their own stories in their books, in Cantone’s recent work, ‘The Camorra’s Gold’ she is never the centre of attention. Rather, she talks about the things she sees everyday: the Camorra boss, for example, who, like Imelda Marcos, has 92 pairs of shoes and 72 pairs of luxury trousers, all designer labels.

The TEMA  section on women travellers is introduced by Silvia Neonato. Nineteenth century women explorers, such as Alexandra David Néel, Freya Stark and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, were the intrepid forerunners of today’s travel writers, business women and news correspondents. While there is a certain continuity in the phenomenon of economic migration through the centuries, Neonato points out, women have always played and still play a vital role.

Stories of migration follow. Maria Pace Ottieri tells the story of a Moroccan woman who leaves her daughter behind and accompanies a Saudi woman to Europe. Fourteen years later, Aisha has an Italian husband and little Ahmed, and her daughter Mallika is brought to Rome to begin a new life. The inverse experience is told, in the first person, by Laila Wadia, who returns to her native India and observes that “the wheel seems to have turned full circle”, as Bombay returns to its “primordial marsh” scattered with human faeces. “It’s easier to open the country to free market economics, import machinery and intoxicate its population with materialism and lung cancer than it is to build latrines on a vast scale,” she concludes.

Giuliana Sgrena looks at travelling from the point of view of a news correspondent, often in dangerous, war-torn parts of the world. “A journey, for me, starts long before I get onto the plane”, she says, “it starts in my imagination, in my dreams, and in my worries.” But the main thing that characterises the work of a correspondent is curiosity and the need to know the everyday reality of people’s lives, “without ever losing track of who you are.” The imposition of embedded journalism, that creates war propaganda, cannot be combated by armchair journalists relying on the Internet, Sgrena claims. “There is still an important role for witnesses today, and that is why warmongers want to stop journalists from doing their job in places like Iraq and the Gaza Strip.

Marta Dassù confesses to an unexpected bout of ‘fear of flying’ shortly after becoming a mother for the first time. On a US Department of State Visiting Program, with a busy schedule ahead of her, the director of Aspen Italy’s international programme was suddenly forced to change her plans and opt for Amtrak, much to the chagrin of the organisers. Bia Sarasini interviews Renata Pisu, correspondent first for La Stampa and then for La Repubblica, two important Italian dailies, about her experience in China where she lived and worked until the Cultural Revolution, and where she recently returned before the 2008 Olympics. She did not enjoy going back: “too many memories,” she says. “It was a shock seeing how much things had changed.” However, to be a correspondent, she is convinced, like Sgrena, that you have to live in a place, “see, feel, smell” the place you are writing about.

Francesca Neonato looks at the author of Mary Poppins from a completely new angle in her article in this issue. The only thing P.L.Travers had in common with the magic nanny she created in her books was that she never married. She was born in Queensland, Australia, the daughter of an Irishman from whom she inherited her passion for magic and fantasy, and continued to travel throughout her life. She studied Zen, Buddhism, and American Native Indian mythology, living for a period with a Navajo tribe. P.L.Travers, of course, was a pseudonym, so that, as she put it succinctly, “people wouldn’t know whether the books were written by a man, a woman or a kangaroo.” Neonato gives an anthropological reading of the figure of Mary Poppins citing Maria Gimbutas: fairy godmothers, wise women and witches are all “priestesses with the power to give blessings or curses when they want.”

Donatella Alfonso imagines the contents of women’s suitcases while standing at the conveyor belt at the airport. With an increasing number of women managers obliged to travel for work, mobile phones and chargers are the most indispensable items. An essential tool for multitasking, you can never leave home without them. Keeping in touch with the family, checking up on schoolwork and meal schedules, dentists’ appointments and gym lessons, while juggling appointments with clients, is a woman manager’s lot. Of course, aside from the computer, a woman will also always carry a book to keep her company in her hotel room at night and perhaps act as a barrier when eating alone in a restaurant.

Giovanna Pezzuoli provides Leggendaria readers with an overview of films about travel, or representing the spirit of the road movie, in particular with women as protagonists. She opens with the famous quote from ‘Thelma and Louise’: “It’s the fucking Grand Canyon,” in order to comment on its pale imitation, ‘Bonneville’ (2008), with Cathy Bates and Joan Allen. Amos Gitai’s ‘Free Zone’ (2005), ‘Frozen River’ (2008), written and directed by Courtney Hunt, and Crialese’s film about Italian emigration to America at the beginning of the last century, ‘Nuovomondo’ (2006), are critiqued together with a film about women’s migration directed by Federico Bondi in 2008, ‘Mar Nero’.

Iaia Pedemonte explores the new trend towards sustainable tourism, led by women travellers who seek to have a different kind of impact when they travel for pleasure, and by women working in the sector of tourism who represent 50-75 percent of the workforce. Personal contact, environmental preservation, meaningful links with local communities are the key concepts in this tendency, its main aim being to provide alternative sources of income for communities, and especially women in these communities. Rosanna Capitani, who runs a travel agency specialising in women travellers, comments on the potential for tour operators and hotels that provide services for this increasing segment of the market and completes her survey by listing useful websites.

Maristella Lippolis, writer and president of a women’s cultural association in the earthquake-ravaged city of Aquila, describes how she survived post-quake trauma by setting up an open Internet community where activists can meet and discuss strategies.

In the INCONTRO section, Irene Ghidinelli Panighetti interviews the Jerusalem-born Palestinian writer, Liana Badr, who moved back to Ramallah after the Oslo Agreement. The question of language is central to the interview. When she first started writing she wrote in classical Arabic because it was important to show that Palestinians could use the language properly. But later she changed her style, adopting the popular language she learned talking to women as a journalist in the refugee camps. “For me it was a discovery,” Badr says, “because I came from an intellectual background. The women in the refugee camps introduced me to their language and their narratives, which are intimately linked to the lives. I found out that Palestinian women are incredible narrators, both of folk stories and of their own memories.” As a Palestinian woman writer she feels more responsibility than other writers in the world. “As Palestinians we live in a state of permanent sufferance; we never feel we can take a break, because even if I manage to have a decent life there are others around me living in misery.”

Nadia Tarantini interviews Francesco Piccolo who has just completed ‘The separation of the male’, whose protagonist is a man who loves his wife and tends to her needs but is at the same time a lying, shameless polygamist with no remorse. “With this character I can finally admit that my erotic imagination is … a kind of basic model. The erotic imagination of a Mediterranean male, probably the lowest level on the contemporary evolutionary scale.”

In a section entitles ‘In Memoriam’, Anna Maria Crispino, Nadia Tarantini and Mariella Gramaglia remember Roberta Tatafiore, their friend and colleague from the days of ‘Noi Donne’ who recently and unexpectedly took her own life.

The SPECIALE section is devoted to the thriller genre. Lorella Reale critiques the genre from a historical and stylistic point of view, while Lia Giachero looks at the French thriller writer, Fred Vargas (a pseudonym for Frédérique Audoin), whose ‘commissaire’ Adamsberg, deputy, Danglard, and the almost super-human policewoman, Violette Retancourt, have become classics. Andrea Pezzé examines Argentinian thrillers by Silvia Maldonado, Carlos Gamero and Juan José Saer, while Francesca Pasini discusses the anarchic characters in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy who delve into the darkest corners of a society in the grips of a profound transformation. The Norwegian thriller writer, Anne Holt, with her highly original detective couple, Johanne Vik and Yngvar Stubø, like other Scandinavian writers uses the genre to explore social and political issues and reveal the underbelly of their apparently tranquil countries.

The PRIMOPIANO review section opens with poems by Marina Giovannelli, photos by Gianni Benedetti, and works by Gina Morandini. Maria Vittoria Vittori reviews Maria Clelia Cardona’s new novel, ‘The Fury of the Devil’, while Adriana Chemello looks at how writing can exorcise painful memories, quoting Tabucchi who once said: “In order to understand who we are we have to tell our stories.” Marilena Menicucci reviews two books by Edith Dzieduszycka, a secular via crucis that lends dignity to the condition of widowhood, and Annamaria Ferramosca examines Luisa Riggio’s second work of fiction. Piera Mattei’s article on Lidia Mangiacapre’s posthumous poetry collection is followed by a piece on a reconstruction of the history of International Women’s Day by Tilde Capomazza and Marisa Ombra in the form of a book and a DVD. Oriana Palusci goes on to look at Anglo-Indian film relationship, reviewing a book by Lidia Curti and Susanna Poole called, ‘Indian screens, global language’. Laura Corradi poses the issue of the gender gap in medical practice examining Giovanna Vicarelli’s new book on the difficulties women face in accessing high profile positions in medicine. Women doctors were traditionally healers, witches or midwives, but as long ago as in the fourth century B.C. an Athenian law forbade women, who regularly practised as surgeons outside the city, from studying or practising medicine or pharmacology in Athens. Francesca Gorini goes on to examine Devra Davis’s latest contribution to the debate on environmental oncology, while Francesco Colotta proposes an evolutionary approach to the disease. Illustrated by the Indian contemporary artist, Durga Bai, the children’s book section contains reviews of books by Begum Rokheya and Sakhawat Hossain and an article on animated books by Saverio De Luca.

In the LETTURE section, reviewed the latest books by Valeria Viganò, Valeria Palumbo, Manuela Bisani, Marina Mayer, Angela Luce, Romana Petri, Elena Bellei, Marinella Fiume, Carol McClearly and Anna Pavignano. 

LEGGENDARIA N.74
“VIOLENCE” - "Violenza"
72 pages, 9 euros

In the 74th edition of Leggendaria, March 2009, the theme of violence returns, a year after last Spring’s issue, ‘Women, Politics and Violence’.  Violence seems to have become a pervasive presence within the current government’s political discourse and this issue explores how. From the law on security that introduces racist policies, making it obligatory for doctors and schoolteachers to denounce undocumented migrants, to the law currently under discussion in the Italian Senate that would make it obligatory for doctors to artificially feed and hydrate patients even when they have expressly asked not to be subjected to these procedures.  We have thus all become non-subjects, non-citizens, and hostages to this political violence. The Speciale this month is devoted to Grace Paley, while two reportages deal with women’s rights in Mexico and Venezuela.  Other topics include Katherine Bigelow’s latest film, women and the trades union movement, and, of course, as always, a recent selection of must-reads.

Bia Sarasini’s opening article in the long ‘Tema’ section on violence poses two rhetorical questions: “what is more violent? The threat of being raped out on the streets or a law that establishes the destiny of your life and your body? What is more dangerous? Male violence or the violence of a State that invades our life with its laws?” Recent over-hyped media coverage of seemingly indiscriminate rapes, committed largely by foreigners with young Italian girls the victims, has created a political short-circuit, with short-term ideological responses rather than long-term strategies for protecting women in the streets but also in their own families, where we know most of the violence takes place. The emotional upheaval following a father’s legal battle to free his daughter from 17 years of vegetative coma by suspending her feeding and hydration tubes has led to one of the most violent reactions in recent Italian political history. The idea of a passive female vessel evoked by the inert body of this coma victim appeared to release an atavistic male fantasy: the Italian Prime Minister, in his appeal to his cabinet to disavow the court-ruling and pass an emergency law suspending patients’ rights, justified his position by saying that, physically and technically, the woman could still procreate. The Vatican hierarchy, needless to say, has followed the question closely, and dictated the government’s position from the start. No discussion of the proposed law has been possible; not one opposition amendment has been accepted.

Assunta Sarlo’s article follows up the same theme of state violence, with women as the main victims in her article. Entitled ‘Bodies as Public Places’, Sarlo alludes to Barbara Duden’s idea of the disembodied woman. Migrants, and especially migrant women, are the natural victims of the new law on security - that favourite subject for the political right when it is lost for a subject to arouse voters’ emotions. The law signals a return to a primitive logic whereby undocumented, means illegal, which therefore means criminal. Doctors and teachers, indeed anyone in a position of public responsibility, are required to inform the authorities if undocumented workers come to their notice. As Sarlo comments, it has been proved that providing a safe haven for women while they are pregnant is an essential step towards building a positive doctor-patient rapport, which then carries over into the child’s first year, and into a more general discourse of public health. If migrant women are scared to go the doctor for fear of being denounced, the potential negative effects for them, their children, and for society at large are incalculable.

Giulia Dalla Negra reviews a book by Maria Attanasio called ‘From the Atlas Mountains to the Appenines’. This book tells the story of a young Moroccan boy, Youssef, who arrives in Italy illegally to look for the mother he hasn’t seen for 18 months. The story is interwoven with echoes of an Italian nineteenth century classic, ‘From the Apennines to the Andes’ by Edmondo De Amicis (better known for his over sentimental ‘Libro Cuore’), which deals with the theme of Italian emigration. As Dalla Negra says, this constant reminder that ‘we’ were once ‘them’, and that ‘they’ have become ‘us’ is a useful antidote to the increasingly outspoken racism that the Italian print media and television disseminate.

Pina Piccolo’s poem, Mediterraneo 2008, illustrated with a haunting charcoal drawing by Francesco Chiacchio, was inspired by the true story of seven Tunisian fishermen who were arrested and tried for fishing 44 illegal migrants out of the sea 40 miles off the coast of the Italian outpost island of Lampedusa and saving their lives. They were accused of encouraging illegal immigration to Italy.

Maria Grosso prefaces her critique of Ari Folman’s animated docu-drama ‘Waltzing with Bashir’, with a quote from the sculptress Louise Bourgeois: “I had a flashback of something that never existed.” In Grosso’s view the work is ambiguous and misleading: it uses the “artifice” of a documentary to claim that what it is saying is ‘the truth’; it uses animation, that became fashionable with Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’, in order to falsify history more easily; it uses autobiography, with a first-person voice off, as a “reassuring guarantee of innocence” and, finally, in defiance of film convention, it employs “false flashbacks”. In this way, Grosso, claims, the director seeks absolution and lets Sharon and his government off very lightly. It is strange, she concludes, that in these times of infinite availability of information, the “virus of revisionism and of oblivion” are on their way back.

Silvia Neonato’s article, ‘Bodies at work’, reveals the way Italian women were considered when they first substituted men in the factories during the First World War. Examining the archives of the Ansaldo factory, the historian, Augusta Molinari, finds that women workers were fiercely contested by their male co-workers, with the usual sexist arguments: they were stealing a salary, they were frivolous time-wasters, and, finally, they were “up to no good, flirting with whoever is available, singing and even … pulling their skirts up over their knees”. In the office records, women were classified simply as ‘female’, without any other qualification or distinction. Most of these workers were war widows or mothers of soldiers, for whom the war represented an opportunity to work outside the home, and this contributed to a profound transformation in society.

Mariella Gramaglia reviews two books, one about the history of 1968, by Anna Bravo, and the other about writing a diary, by Simonetta Piccone Stella. To do this she chooses five key words or concepts that, in her view, unite them. These concepts are: Practice, Intimacy, The Heart, Pain and Caring, and Caring and Indifference. Gramaglia concludes that understanding the last 40 years is essential for understanding ourselves today. “Before there was silence and today there is a multiplicity of voices”, and yet, she asks, “have we really changed so much?” To put the question another way: to what extent has scientific and technological progress reshaped our view of ourselves, our bodies and our reproductive rights?

In the first of the two articles in the ‘Reportage’ section, Emanuela Borzacchiello claims that Mexico is “a country that is changing face” owing to the recent abortion law, finally passed after 30 years’ debate. Every year an estimated half-million illegal abortions took place, and 7.2 percent of deaths annually were ascribed to the practice. The new law not only makes abortion legal in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy in the Distrito Federal, but also makes it the responsibility of the State, and gives access to the same services to women in the other federal states. It also states that the foetus acquires rights as a person at birth, giving women rights for the first time rather than protecting their embryos. In the City of Mexico, social transformations run deep: four families out of ten are headed by single women, and as of 2006, the capital gives the same rights to unmarried couples, gay or straight, as to married ones.

Barbara Meo Evoli discusses women’s rights in Venezuela in her report from the country ten years after Chavez came to power. In the 1970s, Evoli recounts, the motto of Venezuelan feminists was “the revolution must take place both in the squares and in the home.” The optimism generated by Chavez, with, for example, the imposition of 50 percent of women candidates in the electoral lists, however, has worn thin in everyday life: according to Maria Santini, who runs a refuge for battered women, “we still bear the brunt of nearly all of life’s responsibilities.” Evoli’s report shows that, although progress has been made in terms of political representation – 60 percent of city council members are women, 70 percent of the head teachers recruited for the new schools built by the government in deprived areas are women – the country is still far from achieving real equality. “Violence”, says the Venezuelan psychologist Susana Medina, “is born from the inequality between the two sexes. The family appears mother-centred, but actually the system is still patriarchal… and violence is endemic in society.” The report also discusses the controversial welfare subsidy, “Madres del barrio”, which pays women to stay at home and look after their children, thus reaffirming patriarchal values, as well as creating dependence and “curtailing women’s opportunities and free political choices.” Bolivia is also under transformation, with a new Constitution recently approved, which guarantees gender equality and obliges the state to punish the perpetrators of violence against women. For indigenous women who, the Bolivian feminist Claudia Espinoza claims, were doubly discriminated against, this is a huge step forward: “the key for guaranteeing the rights of women and of the indigenous populations of Bolivia.”

The ‘A Margine’ section opens with a review of newly available audio-books in Italian by Nadia Tarantini, followed by a report of the fourth edition of the art festival, ‘ Art for Art’s Shake’, featuring seven women artists who, with their paintings, photographs and installations, illustrate the theme ‘disharmonic harmony’. The artists are Sunnifa Hope, Carla Matii, Marina Fulgeri, Sergia Avveduti, Franesca Grilli, Gwenneth Boelens, and Daria Martin. The article that closes the section is Maria Grosso’s critique of Katherine Bigelow’s new film, ‘The Hurt Locker’. Examining the idea that ‘war is a drug’, the relentlessly close-up images of the everyday goings on of a special bomb squad operating in Baghdad during the Iraq war, is Bigelow’s way of expressing the moral necessity of revealing the true nature of the conflict, of which, “we know nothing, see nothing” in the official news.

Daniela Daniele has dedicated the ‘Speciale’ of this edition to the extraordinary literary figure, Grace Paley, who died on August 22, 2007, and follows three themes in her detailed discussion. The first is that of the subtle influence of the Ukrainian writer, Isaak Babel, who inspired her narrative technique, which adopts the spoken voice to illustrate the hidden drama behind ordinary “fragments of life”. The second is the theme of age and aging, a process that has shifted Paley’s poetic discourse from the political and public (such as the collection, ‘365 Reasons Not to Have Another War’, 1989), to the introspective and intimate, often through closer contact with nature. Finally, in the collections, ‘Begin Again’ and the posthumous ‘Fidelity’, the frugality of country life and the simplicity and necessity (“like bread”) of sexual expression even in later life are the themes Daniele explores in her analysis. Towards the end of her life, Paley began to reconsider her Yiddish background, not in a religious sense, but rather in a quest à rebours for an identity that had animated her first short-story collection. Paley’s essential and concise style thus makes her work the profane, desacralised equivalent of the ‘midrash’, the Jewish moral tale.

The ‘Primopiano’ section opens with a conversation between Anna Simone and the film director, Anna Negri, who has recently published a book about her political experience of the feminist struggles of the 1970s. Marina De Chiara goes on to explore the possible links between new global media and web communication and the questions posed by postcolonial theories by means of a review of Federica Timeto’s presentation of a book she has edited entitled, ‘The Culture of Difference; Feminism, Visuals and Post-Colonial Studies’. Stefania Lucamante reviews Melania Mazzucco’s new book, which examines the last delirious week of the Venetian artist Tintoretto’s life and reveals the torments of his daughter, Marietta, the object of the artist’s tyrannical and egotistic love. This is followed by Fausta Squatrini’s review of Grazia Livi’s latest short-story collection, ‘The Wind and the Motorbike’. Ivana Rinaldi then digests a selection of books celebrating the centenary of the Italian CGIL trade union, concluding that, despite the many achievements of the union in terms of women’s rights in the workplace and in the family, the new challenges of globalisation and new market development models have caught many unaware and unprepared.

Francesca Neonato presents a new collection edited by Michela Pasquali called ‘Beyond Gardens’, while Silvia Rulli illustrates the research project, ‘Age, Gender and Work Opportunities for Actors in Europe’ conducted by Warwick University’s Industrial Relations Research Team and funded by the European Commission, which concludes that discrimination is rife, especially in terms of actors’ career spans, longer for men than for women. Most actors are unable to live off acting, and are obliged to take on other work to support themselves, but there are more women on the lower pay scales. In terms of perception, women are required to be attractive, while men are considered creative. An aging actress, especially if she is from an ethnic minority, is thus subject to a triple discrimination.

In the ‘Letture’ section Silvia Neonato comments on Lilli Gruber’s book ‘Witches’ that examines the role of influential women in Italy and Europe and evokes their struggle for their rights. An Italian male politician Gruber quotes sums up her position: “women cannot count on the support of men in their quest to occupy important positions; nobody gives up their own position willingly, and men certainly won’t do so for women.” Other works presented in the books section include: an exploration of Saint-Exupery’s emotional and psychological background, reviewed by Nadia Tarantini; a new novel by Monica Bianchetti, discussed by Marilena Menicucci; a manga novel by Taguchi critiqued by Maria Vittoria Vittori; three family-based intimate stories by Chiara De Natale Maurri, again reviewed by Menicucci; a perfect reversal of an African colonial novel written by Lara Santoro and commented on by Nadia Tarantini; three books about exile and non-belonging, scrutinised by Silvia Neonato; an emotional new novel based on her own experience by Sandra Petrignani, perused by Anna Maria Crispino; and a book examining the figure of Galileo called ‘Horoscopes and Telescopes: Galileo, Astrologers and New Science’, reviewed by Giuliano Capecelatro.

In the children’s section, a new collection for young adults analysing the success of Japanese cartoon figures; while Sara Pennypacker’s pestiferous Clementine has just been presented at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

LEGGENDARIA n. 73

“Dall’economia domestica all’economia di mercato/
Home economics and credit crunch”
January 2009 – 68 pages, 8 euros

The January 2009 issue of Leggendaria takes a look at the financial crisis through the lens of home economics: the domestic credit crunch to which women are so much more exposed than men. As well as the usual selection of new fiction, poetry, art, audiovisuals, theatre and children’s books, the ‘Special’ section celebrates the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth.

• Monica Luongo’s ‘Tema’ article, ‘Who pays the highest price?’ examines the financial crisis -after ten years’ of testosterone-driven risk-taking in the market place - from a woman’s point of view. Women always pay a high price in times of war, poverty and unemployment: they are the first to lose their jobs and to have to make sacrifices to feed their families. They are the ones with low paid short-term contracts, who are not paid full social security benefits, and yet bear the brunt of taking care of the elderly and the young. The recent debate on raising women’s retirement age from 60 to 65 risks becoming sterile, Luongo concludes, if radical structural changes are not made in the workplace.

• The development economist Salvatore Monni addresses the question of what changes need to be made to reform the welfare system and thus increase gender equality. Economics, in general, he laments, does not generally adopt a gender perspective: income distribution is measured by traditional parameters. Similarly, the unequal distribution of tasks within the domestic sphere has not been sufficiently analysed. While official statistics show an increase in women’s employment, this belies the fact that the increase owes much to the fact that more women are the recipients of so-called ‘flexible’ contracts – that is, jobs with little security and even fewer rights.

• In a similar vein, Anna Maria Crispino interviews Laura Moschini, whose research interests revolve around ethics, economics and feminism. Asked whether the presumed neutrality of economics is under attack, Moschini responds that a gender perspective soon proves that the subject has never been neutral. It is, rather, a system for preserving the (predominantly) male status quo. Feminist experience places more emphasis on the idea of a ‘good life’ or on Nussbaum and Sen’s concept of gender budgeting and capability theories, rather than on the profit motive of liberal market economics. The decision-making centres of international organisations, boards and banks, Crispino observes, still comprise almost exclusively old white men: is there any chance of resolving the conflict between women and power? Moschini concludes that women need to believe in themselves more, but men need to accept the fact that a combination of women and men in power is a more effective recipe for a balanced approach to the marketplace.

• A new report on part-time labour produced by the Via Dogana Quaderno examines a new trend for professional women who ask for part-time contracts in order better to reconcile their lives with their careers – be it for starting or a family or for pursuing a more creative activity. This trend is currently a prerogative of the middle class and of dual-income couples, while single mothers and immigrant women workers, the authors conclude, are clearly excluded.

• Nadia Tarantini explores the potential of going ‘back to the future’ in our domestic economy and rediscovering some of the skills once possessed by our grandmothers but lost by the new generations (and often farmed out to professionals at a considerable cost). Mending, clothes making, recycling materials, removing stains without going to the cleaner’s. Today there are many blogs that reveal the ‘secrets’ that were once the heritage of every wife and mother: it’s a matter of changing your habits and frame of mind, they all insist. And while we are about it, why not move forward, into the future? If we buy Free Trade, build bio-dynamically, install sun panels and use renewable energy sources we are already addressing many of the issues of the future.

• The anthropologist, Francesca Lulli, analyses the African customs of micro-credit and women’s associations and suggests that the informal social relations held by women in their villages could be a way forward even in our society. The ‘feminization of poverty’ is an issue all over the world: market crises and consequent unemployment cause men to move to the cities to look for work, leaving women behind to cope with their extended families and cultivating the land. Forced to become self-reliant, women often form associations offering mutual support, credit and courses in basic literacy and job skills, thus contributing to development.

• Water is the subject of Federica Giardini’s reflection: some places are ravaged by flooding and tsunamis, while in others water is a scarce resource, making the availability of water a matter of democracy, as Vandana Shiva claims. Other important resources should also be safeguarded and not wasted: these include health, education, and public services.

• The SPECIALE this issue celebrates the centenary of the birth of Simone de Beauvoir, and presents a useful glossary of 15 key words in her work, edited by Giuliana Misserville, and accompanied by some striking photographs. This short selection of quotes from her most important works represents a useful introduction to (or review of) the famous author’s philosophy of life. The key words (in alphabetical order in Italian) are: America, Walking, Women, Existentialism, Happiness, Femininity, Literature, Freedom, Him, Maternity, Nature, Passion, Women’s Matters, Sexuality, and Universalism.

• Loredana Lipperini’s passion for women Manga writers finds expression in the new ‘Death Note’ by Tsugumi Ohba, a complex thriller illustrated by Takeshi Obata that contemplates social, ethical and philosophical issues while taking your breath away.

• Martina Piperno reports on a conference held at Rome Sapienza University in November 2008: three days dedicated to a single seminal work, ‘Corinne’ by Madame De Stael. The identity of De Stael in the context of modern European history, her role in relation to Italy and the way the novel was received in Italy and Europe were the subject of the three days.

• Elisa Coco describes an unusual theatrical week held by the Teatro San Martino in Bologna to honour the founder and director of a theatre workshop who died prematurely ten years ago. Bianca Maria Pirazzoli’s first name means white, and the round table discussion that kicked off the week’s events was entitled, ‘Bianca’s Colours’. A prize in her name has also been established for women playwrights and theatre scholars. To celebrate her prize, Candelara Romero performed ‘Hijos’, a piece about her family’s odyssey after the military dictatorship took power in Argentina.

• Laura Angiulli’s documentary ‘Facing East’, about three cities – Sarajevo, Mostar and Srebrenica - symbols of war and destruction in the former Yugloslavia, is the topic of Maria Grosso’s article ‘A Cartography of Pain’. First shown at the Horizons section of the Venice Biennale, the director describes the work as being deliberately “open and unfinished”, almost to “reflect the sense of instability inherent in these cities”, but at the same time to avoid the danger of layering the images with “ideas and prejudices”. The documentary is thus a “complex and contaminated patchwork” of interviews, theatrical performances, and political and literary references together with “explorations of the cities as they are today”. Angiulli says it is not easy to imagine these places without “the virus of nationalism”, but that if it were possible, it would be important to establish a secular state because “religion divides, whether we like it or not.”

• The great South African singer, Miriam Makeba, who died while on tour in Italy at the age of 76 after a performance in support of Gomorra author Roberto Saviano, is fittingly commemorated in this issue by the prominent African Studies  Italian professor Itala Vivan, by the South African cinema and theatre actress, Gcina Mhlophe, as well as by Ken Bugul, the Senegalese writer and archivist. They comment on the importance of her contribution to the cause of justice in her own country and abroad, as well as to making South African music world famous – to the extent that she was known as ‘Mama Africa’.

• Nadia Tarantini, with a touch of irony and nostalgia, comments on a collection of Italian magazine covers from the 1960s and early 1970s, interweaving her observations with memories from her past. The title and sub-title say it all: ‘How sexy we were then (and we didn’t know it)’.

• In the, PRIMO PIANO section, Loredana Magazzeni reviews the Italian translation of ‘Newborn’, Kate Clanchy’s third significant poetry collection that dissects the experience of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and motherhood, revealing the everyday as well as the unexpected aspects of the experience, which, she says, is ‘not art’ but hard work and elbow grease. Adriana Chemello comments on Adriana Zarri’s new work of historical biographical fiction, ‘The Life and Death without Miracles of Celestine VI’. The essayist, journalist and theologian enjoys narrating the life of a semi-imaginary Pope that abolishes the vote of celibacy and the role of cardinals, ordains women and donates his little state to Italy, with a clause that obliges Italy to redistribute its wealth among the poor in Rome. Itala Vivan examines the eleven short stories collected under the title ‘Dreams’ by the South African author of ‘The Story of a South African Farm’ (1883), Olive Schreiner. The short stories – brief allegories, fantastications or daydreams - were written during her long and often unhappy travels from London, to Paris and then on to Genoa and Alassio in Italy. Monica Luongo comments wrily on the recent works of two aging male writers, Joseph Roth and J.M. Coetzee. Luongo admires the honesty with which both the authors and their protagonist/alter-egos contemplate the aging process, their inability to accept the biological inevitability of waning sexual activity. Ultimately, she concludes, men are more isolated because they are not in the habit, as women are, of relating to others and putting themselves in context. Anna Maria Crispino reviews a book by Monica Farnetti with the title ‘Women of my Taste: Profiles of Contemporary Women Writers’. Farnetti has always been an active member of the Società delle Letterate, and the 21 essays in her book – dedicated, among others, to Colette, Mansfield, Sapienza, Durand, Ortese, and Lispector - are more than just profiles. In Crispino’s words they are “crossings, cartographic and emotional connections, flashes of recognition, exercises in gratitude, premonitions of lightning striking the mind and epiphanies of observation.”

• In the LETTURE section, a new edition of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in Italian is reviewed by Sara Bennet, while Maria Vittoria Vittori looks at Sue Miller’s ‘The Senator’s Wife’, which explores the age-old theme of infidelity. Adriana Lorenzi reviews Gabriella Musetti’s new poetry collection, and Giulia Dalla Negra comments on a fascinating new study on Edith Craig by Roberta Gandolfi. Edith, sister of Gordon Craig, the English Modernist theatre practitioner, was a feminist, political activist, lesbian and the first woman theatre director, founder of the Pioneer Players – the first acting company to be founded by a female director. Sara Poletto reviews a study of immigrant women workers published by the Mediterranean Institute together with the social cooperatives Dedalus and Eva, and concludes that non-Italian women are doubly discriminated in this country because of its structural inefficiency. And yet, as Sara Bennet shows in her piece about the 2008 edition of ‘Mother Tongue’, a competition held every year to find new voices in Italian from the immigrant community, women immigrants have an important role to play in forming a new cultural vision of immigration. Other works reviewed include: ‘A Lioness in Senegal’ by Peppe Sessa, a new novel by the Basque author Arantxa Urretabizkaia, Laura Ricci’s poetry collection ‘The Witch Poet’, Stefanie Barron’s Jane Austen Mysteries, a new study of the art of interpreting handwriting, now used by human resources departments regularly, Anna Zoli’s exploration of contemporary Australia as she searches for her daughter who has decided to settle there for life, a book edited by Letizia Bernazza on Fabrizio Pallara’s Theatre of Apparitions, a painful autobiography exploring the devastating effects of depression by Roberta Rubini, and an equally gruelling study of adult violence towards children within the family by Ilaria Drago. To wrap up the section, Silvia Neonato reviews Elena Gianini Belotti’s new book, ‘Short-Circuit’, which tells different stories about the lives of immigrants in Italy, while Maria Clelia Cardona looks at Sara Zanghi’s new study of Matilda of Canossa (1046-1115), the medieval oxymoron, as Cardona calls her combination of being female and holding power.

• The ‘UNDER-15 section closes the issue with an article about an interesting new collection of children’s books, each of which present a musical instrument and tell the story of its development by means of a story.

LEGGENDARIA 71/72 

“Women and Science” - Donne di scienza

November 2008, 82 pages, 12 euros

‘Women and Science’ is the name of the November 2008 issue of Leggendaria, dedicated to the Genoa Science Festival and the many women scientists that helped animate this year’s theme of ‘Diversity’. The issue hosts articles by, and interviews of, some of these women who have challenged established power relations, cultural prejudices, and practical difficulties to become top research scientists in their fields.

Accompanied by images by Nicolò and Gianetti, the Tema section opens with a homage to the organizer of the Genoa Science Festival, Manuela Arata, by Bia Sarasini. Arata’s dedication and energy have brought the number of visitors to the Festival from 136,000 in the first edition in 2003 to an incredible 250,000. Her deep conviction is that the glass ceiling for women scientists can only be shattered if the women who succeed in reaching positions of power in their field help others emerge. In medicine, and astrophysics, for example, the process is already underway.

Silvia Neonato traces the historical origins of the Festival’s unique formula for hosting guests and speakers. In the sixteenth Century, when Genoa was a Marine Repubblic, patrician families were called on to give hospitality to important merchants arriving in the city. The hospitality and warmth of the Genoa Science Festival, universally recognised by participants, owes a debt to this history. Thanks to the energy and entrepreneurship of Caterina Di Martino Fasolini, today’s hosts open up their homes to Festival guests, and welcome them as if they were family. Another element that contributes to the vitality of the Festival, Sarasini and Neonato claim, is a network of young animators and guides, trained by Francesca Messina, and the active participation of schools encouraged and aided by Angelica Carnevari, whose untiring efforts have brought 25,000 students from the Liguria Region and 7,000 students from other areas to the Festival.

In an interview by Francesca Gorini of Helga Nowotny, an Austrian sociologist, currently vice president of the European Research Council, the word ‘unconventional’ comes up. Women’s careers are destined to follow unconventional paths, and this, Nowotny claims, can be transformed into an advantage.

Silvia De Stefano talks to the mathematician, Simonetta Di Sieno, about the many misconceptions that exist about Mathematics. Di Sieno blames the way the subject is taught in schools, quoting Lockhart. It is as if, she claims, music were made obligatory, and for 13 years people only learned to read music without ever listening to the sounds music produces. Di Sieno presents an exhibition on the Festival theme of Diversity that challenges ideas of sameness and difference. De Stefano also interviews the Astrophysicist, Patrizia Caraveo, who gave a talk on gamma rays at the Festival, while Simona Stringer talks to Gabrielle Walker, a journalist who travels around the world and writes about climate change. Her PhD in Chemistry helped her realise how complicated global warming was, and she felt the need to explain the urgency of the situation in layman’s terms.

Another woman scientist and industrialist interviewed by De Stefano is Catia Bastioli, who has invented and registered the patent for a biodegradable plastic that rots like apple skin in two days together with other compost. Anna Maria Crispino holds an interesting exchange with Devra Davis, an environmental oncologist at Pittsburgh University whose latest book, ‘The Secret History of the War on Cancer’(Basic Books 2007) reveals the extent to which the environment plays a role in the onset and development of the illness. Prevention, she claims, is a political choice. What we need is a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ on environmental risk factors, rather than hiding behind the idea of industrial secrets.

Elisabetta Del Ponte imagines, together with the astrophysicist, Giovanna Tinetti (UCL, London), a journey to planets outside the solar system, 63 million light years away. This new frontier depends on the sophistication of the new generation of telescopes being developed. Del Ponte also interviews the heroine of the Aviarian Flu epidemic, Ilaria Capua, who put the genetic code for the virus on line as soon as she had unravelled it, rather than hold the discovery back and patent it herself. The result of this bid for transparency in public health information was that others published papers before her (and, Capua reminds us, publishing means access to research funds) but she was awarded December’s ‘Revolutionary Mind’ by the influential ‘Seed’ magazine. Capua is convinced that transparency is the only way to share information and protect public health, but, she insists, it must be backed with funds and be sustainable over time.

Simona Stringa talks about the problems gifted children have to deal with at home and at school with the Dutch psychologist, Lianne Hoogeveen. There is a common prejudice that catering to the needs of gifted children is elitist, but this, in Hoogeveen’s experience, is not true. Gifted children from deprived backgrounds are particularly vulnerable. Elisabetta Del Ponte goes on to interview the French children’s science writer, Delphine Grinberg, who has just won the EU Prize for Science Communication. Children are not what they used to be, she admits. They have the world at their fingertips via Internet, but at the same time they have not experienced many of the basic scientific principles in the first person: lighting a fire, picking fruit, mixing water and soap, taking risks and learning to avert them. Exposing children to these experiences can also teach them about diversity, show them that there is more than one possibility, that there is choice. Cooking, for example, is an excellent laboratory.

The Tema section on Women Scientists closes with an interview by Francesca Gorini of the Cambridge based economist, Luisa Corrado, who has recently won the Marie Curie Excellence Award for her work on the relationship between economic growth and individual wellbeing in Europe. Corrado confirms that money alone does not bring happiness, but one of her main findings is that social capital is an essential element of wellbeing in advanced societies, whereas in developing and transitional societies, family-centredness leads to higher  ‘happiness’ indices. Silvie Coyaud signs off the section with a provocative article asking “Would you encourage your daughter to pursue a scientific career?”. Though prejudice among the younger generation is no longer prevalent, and women have overtaken men in university enrolments and grades, there is still a glass ceiling for women in science. The case of the Japanese researcher, Mitiko Go, who challenged a male professor claiming a “woman was not enough” to fill an academic post, illustrates this. The Japanese government tripled the budget for encouraging women to go into research science and doubled nursey and other family-oriented facilities in labs. Go became president of a prestigious university, and her first step was to declare the working day from 9am-5pm and to banish overtime as a criteria for promotion.

In the Diversity section, Bia Sarasini has a long conversation with the Italian scientist, Elena Cattaneo, an expert in stem cell research., on the subject of bioethics. Cattaneo distinguishes between adult stem cells, used successfully in bone marrow transplants and cornea repairs, and stem cells from embryos, which cause so much debate – partly because, she claims, the hope they have excited is almost excessive. “There is no magic solution”, she says, and “a lot of research still to be done”. The problem, of course, is that “part of the population (not the majority, according to Eurobarometer, thinks a blastocyst of 110-120 cells is a human being.” Since research into their incredible potential requires destroying the cells, this is clearly a problem. Cattaneo makes a very clear point about the hypocrisy of governments which pragamatically allow research to go ahead but only if it is funded privately, while refusing to sponsor it themselves out of political expediency. The US is a case in point: “The same land that defends a blastocyst of 110-120 cells, with no heart and no brain, tollerates the execution of human beings with billions of cells, hearts and brains.” Cattaneo compares the challenges facing a woman scientist not to a glass ceiling but to a labyrinth, with continuous impediments, but with a solution if you can find it. Of course, she admits, a woman’s early career often coincides with starting a family, and it is essential to have the full support of  both your loved ones and your workplace. But when these conditions are met, and you make a contribution to building up hope in a new cure, then the joy is so great “you feel you are flying.”

Anna Maria Crispino discusses depression with the psychologist, Elvira Reale, and asks, “Why are women so much more subject to this debilitating condition””. The problem, as identified by Reale, is that while the disease is psycho-social, often, in the case of women, biological factors are called into play. The three main risk factors for depression  – work related stress, burn out and violence – are more prevalent among women, and yet treatment is often limited to medication.  Reale claims that the idea of motherhood as a sacrifice needs to be addressed, but many associations run by women for women, such as the Women’s Mental Health Prevention Centre Reale runs in Naples, are devalued and emarginated in the context of the national health system.

Chiara Saraceno, from her new chair at the Social Research Institute (WZB) in Berlin, talks to Silvia Neonato about bioethical issues linked to the family, and, in particular, about death. “Dealing with these issues is like being in front of a tapestry: when you follow one thread, or colour, your persective on the others changes.” Thus, Saraceno says, scientists have their say in deciding when life begins, and other discourses – religious, sociological, philosophical  - come into play when it comes to deciding what a human life is. This is perhaps the moment for science to recognise its limitations and to “open a space for dialogue between medicine, religion, ethics ... and a personal sense of self.”

Adriana Albini offers a light-hearted perspective on the gender gap between scientific publication levels. Women, she claims, make the same number of discoveries as men, but they are more hesitant, are filled with more self-doubt, and more prone to submit their findings to others before publishing them than their male counterparts are. The problem, in Albini’s view, is that “science is communication” and if you don’t publish you are denied access to research funds. The gender gap is not necessarily a result of discrimination, but of a natural, internalised deficit in assertiveness. In the same vein, Nadia Tarantini explores the question of science communication and education, presenting a project on the perception and awareness of science in schools.

After a review by Sara Poletto of Witkowski’s book on the forgotten history of women scientists, almost always mentioned in passing as “wives, assistants, sisters or muses of” great scientists, Antonella Pilozzi’s article claims that the new wave of short-term, flexible labour contracts are the enemy of scientific research, especially for women. In Italy 53 percent of these contracts cover a period of less than a year and are signed by women. The lack of prospects, Pilozzi claims, “negatively influences concentration and productivity”. It’s not so much a problem of a glass ceiling, but of closed doors for women in scientific research.

Pieranna Geravaso and Nicla Vassallo’s article on ‘Objectivity and Values’ casts a philosophical glance at the way women are represented. They claim that prevalent concepts and definitions of women have been, and still are, “shaped by male desire rather than being objectively known.” What objectivity is there, for example, they ask, in “a stereotyped representation of women as being physically and psychologically subordinate to men, or as a sexual object, or as a passive being in contrast to an active male representation?” The very image of an egg passively awaiting a sperm to impregnate it is a misrepresentation of an objective truth. As for values, scientific knowledge can be value free, but technology is trickier. For example, they conclude, it is not always easy to establish whether new technologies – for example, artificial or assisted fertilisation, aesthetic surgery, or even infibulation - are good or bad for women.

In the Incontro section, Pascale Voilley interviews the medieval historian turned novelist, Jane Stevenson, author of the acclaimed ‘Astrea’ trilogy, as well as the thriller, ‘London Bridges’. Her facility for research, and her passion for art, made details her particular strength, while her training as a medievalist gave her an inside understanding of the period settings.

The Primopiano opens with a rediscovery by Maria Vittoria Vittori of an Italian writer, Paola Masino, on the occasion of the centenary of her birth. Born in the year of the Messina earthquake, she wrote “I’m grateful to my daemon for having given me expression in that year of natural convulsions, convulsions of nature not man made.” Leitmotifs of her intense work are Creation, Genesis, Maternity and Paternity, and Vittori, in the second half of her review, compares her intellectual figure to that of Simone De Beauvoir. Masino’s ‘Life and Death of a Housewife’ (1945) which contains the brilliant phrase, “You are not born a woman, you become one”, is compared, in its impact, to De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’.

Alessandra Riccio reviews a new novel by the Cuban writer, Ana Lucia Portela inspired by one evening in the life of Djuna Barnes in Paris. Maria Grosso interviews Stefano Savona on his moving documentary, ‘A Kurdistan Spring’ about Kurdih Pashmerga guerrilla fighters who for thirty years have fought alongside their menfolk for a Kurdish independent state. Savona admits that at first he was totally in love with his subject, and that he took three years to distance himself sufficiently to make the cuts needed to relay the message effectively. The most surprising thing about the documentary is that the film is not about gender, and does not claim to represent a ‘women’s view’. For these fighters, the absolute priority has always been the political struggle.

Itala Vivan comments on Tate Britian’s new exhibition, ‘The Lure of the East. British orientalist Painting’, curated by Paul Goodwin. In the critic’s view, the exhibition concentrates too much on the seduction and attraction of the western world, and in particular of the British, for the ‘Orient’ and fails to represent ‘others’, or even the debate triggered by Said and Derrida now pursued by the academic discipline known as postcolonial studies. Vivan juxtaposes a review of a new book by the Senegalese woman writer, Ken Bugul, called ‘La pièce d’or” (2006). The book is an angry denouncement of the failure of postcolonial independence movements in African countries, and of the betrayal of their people perpetrated by a corrupt ruling class. Another book reviewed by Vivan is the story of China Keitetsi, a girl soldier fighting in the inferno of Uganda.

From the Venice Film Festival, for Primopiano, Maria Grosso reviews Agnès Varda’s self-portrait, ‘Les Plages d’Agnès’, Silvie Verheyde’s ‘Stella’, which explores an eleven year old’s transition from childhood to puberty and from a working class district to a bourgeois lycée, Camille D’Arcimoles’s ‘Che Saccio’, and Claire Denis’s ‘35 Rhums’.

To close the Primopiano section, Poletto reviews Alessandro Del Lago’s book ‘Alma Mater’ denouncing corporative academic practices in Italian universities à la David Lodge; Matilde Passa discusses Gabriella Caramore’s examination of religion and religious practice, and Anna Maria Crispino recommends a novel by Elvira Seminara, ‘Indecenza’ that focuses on a poisonous love triangle between a man and wife and a Ukrainian babysitter.

The Under 15 section presents two books that aim to widen the horizons of the age group. The first is by Francoise Guyon and tells the story of a Vietnamese girl who makes dolls in a factory rather than playing with them. Sponsored by Amnesty, the happy ending aims to raise awareness of the practices behind child labour in the world. The second is a collection of Indian fairy stories by Anita Nair translated into Italian under the title, ‘Balloons and Planets’.

LEGGENDARIA 70
“Males” - Maschi

This issue of Leggendaria dedicated to the other sex is provocatively entitled not “Men’” but “Males”. It explores whether there is such a thing as a “male question” and what this might be, and it presents different views - from both sides of the spectrum - on the male-female relationship and whether there has been any progress in the past few years on this front.

In Bia Sarasini’s opening article she wonders whether the impasse between men and women will ever be overcome. The political climate is unfavourable, she claims, as an authoritarian right wing, associated by George Lakoff with strict fathering and clear gender roles, lends credence to the idea that masculine force is needed to protect the weaker sex and re-establish order, just as military force is needed to protect a nation weakened by terrorism and globalisation. Reproductive rights, Sarasini concludes, have always been, and still are, a focal issue. The certainty of paternity has been called into question, and male resentment against women’s new-found freedom is still alive and well.

Giorgio Galli, a well-known Italian political scientist, has contributed an interesting article called ‘Weakened Patriarchism’. Citing Marja Gimbutas’s studies of ancient Europe, Galli claims that after seven thousand years of conflict between the female symbol for the goblet and the male symbol of the sword, male domination has certainly been weakened but it is by no means extinct – as the recent Bush administration has shown with its insistence on war as a means to finding a new world equilibrium. Galli gives the example of Norway’s recent law making it obligatory for women to occupy 40 percent of the positions on company boards (compared to only 15 percent in the US and a mere 3 percent in Italy). This is a female revolution already well underway.

The sociologist Marco Deriu’s article, ‘Males in Transition’, opens with a quote from Alain Touraine claiming that we are already living in a women’s society. Men have money and power, Touraine claims, but women possess the meaning of the situations they have experienced and the capacity to interpret them. Deriu says that the onus is now on men, not only to give up power and privilege, but to reposition themselves and keep up with the enormous changes that have already taken place. Women’s economic, intellectual and sexual independence forces men to reconsider the very structure of their working and family lives, Deriu concludes.

Alberto Leiss, a journalist and writer, claims that the old politics based on the Marxian conflict between master and slave, or boss and worker, is dead and that we are at the dawn of a new age based on a conflict between men and women. Unfortunately, the political arena of today, even on the left, has not yet caught onto this deep transformation and is ill-equipped to deal with it.

Like Leiss, Rosetta Stella ironically quotes the Bible in Latin, ‘In Spe contra Spem’, to critique the fact that institutional politics no longer takes into consideration the idea of a future or of an ideal – for example, the obvious question “what kind of country would I like to live in?” – but banalises its programmes in order to satisfy short-term electoral objectives.

Monica Luongo submits a light-hearted article to this issue in which she seeks (and finds) hope that young males today, the sons of feminist, or at least self-aware and independent-minded, women will be better than their fathers and will represent an idea of progress in the battle between the sexes. While the certainty that these children were wanted, and responsibly procreated, gives them the possibility to be loved, to express and receive affection, to talk and to listen, without being afraid of being ‘girlish’, the downside, Luongo admits, is that there is no longer any authority figure to provide boudaries and punish transgressions. Luongo denies that new stimuli – role games, social networking, Second Life, YouTube – are an impediment to their healthy growth and development. Today’s young men, she feels, will be able to manage their relationships better because they, and their partners, have acquired a vocabulary for doing so.

Silvia Neonato gives her readers a fascinating overview of why clients want to buy sex and why - although the sex market has been radically transformed by the collapse of the former Soviet Union, by globalisation and by increased economic migration - clients are still essentially the same as ever: men who buy sex because they do not want emotional involvement or consequences. Citing the EU funded Report, ‘How Much’, Neonato says that one person in ten in Europe has bought the services of a professional sex worker, contacted either on the streets (clients are usually older, less educated, and married, or officially celibate, men) or through specialised escort sites (clients are generally younger, wealthier, better-educated, professional, computer literate, and single). In the new market of sex workers, on the other hand, one in ten are victims of ‘people trafficking’, are often underage, and are effectively kept as sex slaves by their traffickers. One of the objectives of the study was to discover whether clients are aware of the changes in the market and of the fact that the prostitutes whose services they are using are often victims of violence. The findings were depressingly predictable: clients have no desire to take on board the idea that they contribute to the sex trade and hardly any have noticed signs of abuse. Clients who fall in love with prostitutes and ‘save’ them from the trade, on the other hand, are one of the only ways out of the business for sex slaves. There is a certain amount of nostalgia for the old bordellos, especially in the law-and-order obsessed political right, Neonato concludes. These were places where men could participate in an ancient male ritual, guilt-free, and even have the illusion that they were selecting the person to ‘redeem’ with their attentions.

The unpublished extract in this issue is by the young Roman writer, Christian Raimo. It is taken from a forthcoming novel called ‘Celestial Bodies’.

Bia Sarasini contributes a short article dedicated to the writer and blogger  who goes under the same of Pulsatilla (a homeopathic remedy for female ailments derived from the wind flower, or pulsatilla nigritans). In her new book, after the success of the ‘Ballad of Dried Prunes’, the female hero is Giulietta Squeenz. Pulsatilla’s forthright theory of sex is that most women of her generation (Valeria Di Napoli, her real name, is 26) use sex as a short-cut to obtain intimacy and trust from men. Many of the wild, drunk college girls you see stripping on Internet, Pulsatilla says, are actually virgins waiting for an impossible Mr Right: they use their bodies as a way to attract friendship and widen their social network. She herself has decided to adopt an old-fashioned approach from now on as an antidote, and we wish her luck. “The next man I have sex with,” she announces, “will be the father of my children.”

Silvia Neonato’s second article in this issue of Leggendaria is entitled ‘The virility of the powerful and the neo-romantic wave’ Capitalism, she claims, will never take responsibility for providing greater opportunities for women. Capitalism, quite rightly, is interested exclusively in profit. It is no chance that powerful men surround themselves with a small circle of other powerful men, and transmit power by electing a successor, or ‘dauphin’. Women have not learnt to transmit power, and their power is therefore transient. Oddly enough, Neonato notes, commenting on the proliferation of male ‘agony uncles’ today, young people, who live in a precarious world, in a flexible labour market, with instable family lives, are the ones who seek stability in their love lives. Massimo Gramellini, ‘agony uncle’ for the newspaper La Stampa says: “Perhaps the crisis of the powerful, virile male has led to a form of neo-romaticism?”.

Nadia Tarantini uses short extracts from literature to talk about the ‘Solitude of Real Men’, as she entitles her article. Cervates, Perez-Reverte, Nooteboom, Dumas and Robert Bly all contribute something to that eternal tension between the male aspiration towards achieving great things and the call of the flesh and of common sense.

Simona Bonsignori, in her article on ‘the male question’, talks about the recent rebound, in which men feel they have been superceded by women, and feel that they are the ones who need protection, quota systems, paternity rights et al. There is no such thing as a ‘male question’ they recite. Our problems are to do with real life, our jobs. You women ask too much of us, and then you call it a problem.

In the ‘A Margine’ section, Titti Danese describes an unusual theatrical production that is doing the rounds of lighthouses around Italy. In 1937 the lighthouse keeper in Ischia was electrocuted and his wife, Lucia Capunao, became the first woman lighthouse keeper in Italy, holding down the job throughout the war until she retired. The show is produced, written and acted by Lucia’s grandaughter, Lucianna De Falco, and blends the story of this corageous widow and her young children with video interviews of local inhabitants of the island. Francesca Manieri writes about the eighth edition of the summer school run by the Società delle Letterate in collaboration with the Cherry Garden and the University of Florence, held in Florence, May1-4, 2008 and devoted to a discussion of intercultural issues. Federico Bastiani contributes an article on the award of the Galileo Prize for Free Thinking this year to Ingrid Betancourt. The award was presented to Ingrid’s daughter in Florence on June 25, 2008 exactly a week before the Colombian activist was freed.

The ‘Special’ section this year presents an interview by Blanca Garì that was originally published in Spanish, here translated by Gemma Colesanti, of Richard Pankhurt, the son of Silvia Pankhurst, who devoted her entire later life to the Ethiopian cause. Silvia was herself the daughter of the famous suffragette, Emmeline, and was brought up in the tradition of political activism, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Richard, her son, is portrayed in the article at the age of 9, intent on reading the broadsheet, New Times and Ethiopia News (NT and EN), published by his mother, and today he runs the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at the University of Addis Abbeba. Richard claims in the interview that his mothers’ interest in Ethiopia was a direct product of her anti-fascism and her struggle against Mussolini’s occupation of the African country. Furthermore, her interest in art and culture led her to espouse the cause of saving the ancient culture of the Ethiopian people, culminating in an important monograph, ‘Ethiopia, A Cultural History’ (1955). The newspaper, NT and EN, was influential in the independence struggle and in the expansion of Panafricanism, and was taken over by her son, Richard, who turned it into a magazine.  Silvia devoted her later years to building a hospital, applying her strong sense of social justice to the health sector.

The ‘Primopiano’ section opens with a piece by Lia Giachero on the little known Italian nineteenth century cultural figure, critic, translator and journalist, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, the bicentenary of whose birth was celebrated on two separate occasions this year: a round-table discussion organised by the Milan city council cultural archives, ‘A Woman Before her Times’, and a day’s seminar run by the Contemporary History Museum, entitled ‘First Woman of Italy: Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso(1808-1871), between politics and journalism.’ The section continues with a review by Maria Grosso of a book edited by Cristian Raimo (whose unpublished extract we present in this same issue) containing eight unusual portraits of contemporary Italy, which challenge the dominant stereotypes and yet explore the dark underbelly of this complex country. Continuing the ‘Primo Piano’ section, Loredana Magazzeni presents two recently published  collections of Italian women’s poetry: ‘Twelve Italian Women Poets’ edited by Dino Azzalin, and a collection edited by an association called Eloisa’s Thread. Antonella Chittaro goes on to present a new Italian translation by Sara Antonelli of Louisa May Alcott’s strongly ‘abolitionist’ writings: ‘Hospital Sketches’, and two short stories called M.L. and ‘My Contraband, or Two Brothers’. Rita Svandrlik reviews an Italian edition of the correspondence recently translated from the German between the tormented poetess, Ingeborg Bachmann and the gay composer, Hans Werner Henze, who shared an intimate friendship and even cohabited for short periods in Italy. Giuliana Misserville comments on a new book of collected essays on the French writer, Marguerite Duras, edited by Chiara Bertolla and Edda Melon, while Nadia Tarantini introduces us to the London-based Indian writer and blogger who has never been translated into Italian before, Sunny Singh, whose book ‘Krishnas’ Eyes’ has come out this year.

In ‘Incontro’ (meeting), Pino Piccolo talks about how difficult it was to translate ‘Migritude’, a collection of spoken poetry by Shailja Patel, the pacifist and feminist Indian poet who was born and raised in Kenya and has now ‘migrated’ to the United States. Marta Matteini then interviews her about the process.

The ‘Primo Piano’ section closes with a long article by Bia Sarasini entitled ‘The future of politics in an era of post-democracy’ reviewing Mariella Gramaglia’s book that recounts a year in India. Gramaglia’s long experience in the Italian trade union movement led her to embark on a year-long work experience with the Self Employed Women’s Association in Gujarat, as well as a trip through the southern state of Tamil Nadu to follow post-Tsunami reconstruction efforts there.Her book: ‘Indiana: In the Heart of the Most Complex Democracy of the World’ is, in Sarasini’s words, “multi-layered, a tapestry of faces, voices, stories”.

The ‘Letture’ (reading) section presents English traditional fairy stories, Tuscan women’s writing, a Botanist’s story, a new novel, ‘Cosmophobia’, by the Spanish writer of Basque origin, Lucia Etxebarria, as well as the first collection by the Catalan poet, Maria Mercé Marcal. Concentrating on the theme of violence, it also presents a book collecting 300 stories of women who were victims of violence in the year 2006, an investigative thriller by Anne Holt, and the story of a homicide trial told by Camilla Trinchieri.

‘Graphic’ reviews the novel ‘The Mermaid’ by the Italian author Laura Pugno, whose crystalline style and fantasy-inspired narration, Loredana Lipperini claims, owe a great deal to the ‘Mermaid Saga’ by the Japanese Manga cartoonist Rumiko Takahashi.
 

LEGGENDARIA 69 
"The Garden"

The summer edition of Leggendaria is ‘green’ in both cover and content: it is dedicated to private gardens and public green space, and explores  the therapeuetic effect of cultivating a passion for plants, flowers and herbs.  Edited by Francesca Neonato, this issue of Leggendaria views the universal symbol of a garden - a protected place full of potential life - from countless angles, including, of course, that of the books that have been written on the subject in the Primo Piano section. As a reminder that the world is not a walled garden, however, the central Speciale section features the Italian translation, published for the first time, of Arundhati Roy’s speech on genocide, ‘Listening to the Grasshoppers’.

Francesca Neonato, herself a landscape artist and gardener, opens with a piece on healing gardens, quoting the archeologist Marija Gimbutas who studies pre-indoeuropean societies where women were naturally associated with Mother Earth. Women have always worked together, she comments, side by side, and close to the ground, planting seeds, cultivating, harvesting, caring for their young and feeding their families. The experience of Majora Carter, who founded the Sustainable South Bronx Association, Neonato claims, proves that women working together, and planting public green areas even in disadvantaged city scapes, can provide a powerful force for change.

Silvia Neonato examines healing gardens from the point of view of alternative medicine and pharmaceutical research. Reviewing Cristina Borghi’s book Il giardino che cura (The Healing Garden), Silvia Neonato comments on the many studies that show how gardens and gardening can have a therapeutic effect on patients, and therefore, as best practice has shown, gardening also makes economic sense in the context of a hospital.  Borghi worked for thirty years in the drug industry and opted out because she “no longer wanted to be an accomplice of a system that creates illness in order to cure it”. Plants teach you to live, she concludes, to face adversity and to accept failure.

Still on the garden theme, Giovanna Pezzuoli describes the experience in northern Milan of an aroma garden that was originally planted in what was a psychiatric hospital and is now the centre of numerous community projects: theatre, a hostel, a restaurant, an art therapy association and a gardening project with over 5,000 square metres open to whoever wants to cultivate it. Every day 10-12 men and women who are either physically challenged or with mental health problems, come and learn, as Pezzuoli claims, that gardening can teach you more life skills than you can imagine.

An experiment in Genoa is the subject of Silvia Neonato’s second article: ‘Green Line’ is a social and urban project promoted by Renzo Piano in his home town to link the city’s rugged green mountainscape to the ‘Blue Line’ of the sea. Anna Corsi, head of the Urban Lab, as it is called, says proudly that “the wooded land outside the city was saved from urbanisation because it was too steep and mountainous” and that this “wilderness” has become a new resource to be tapped, by creating a green corridor that will transform urban wasteland, transport infrastructure and the estuary of the river Polcevera.

Nadia Tarantini reviews Francis Wyndham’s first novel translated into Italian, ‘The Other Garden’, in which an eccentric woman in her thirties strikes up a friendship with an adolescent boy in a small English town at the outbreak of the Second World War. The patterns of life of the town and of the two friends are destroyed by the war, and the book gives us a window into this time, and its demise.

Novella Cappelletti, editor of the journal Architettura del Paesaggio (Landscape Architecture) describes her life path from Architecture, to Design, to Landscape Architecture, accompanied by a growing passion for writing. A recent writer’s workshop with Dacia Maraini created the perfect synthesis of the two fields: by day gardening and landscaping, as well as visiting famous gardens, and in the evening writing about gardens. “The more I learned the less I realised I could know about this strange art of creating beauty”, she concludes.

Anna Maria Crispino follows up the garden theme by presenting the new Italian facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, with an introduction by Judith Farr, the author of ‘The Gardens of Emily Dickinson’. With the advent of digital photography, the 66 folios are now readily available at an affordable price, and show how important nature was in the poet’s life and work, as Richard Sewall stressed in his biography of the poet.

Closing the garden Tema section, Sara Bennet looks at a book glorifying peonies by Carlo Confidati, as well as three children’s books with trees as their central theme.

In the rubric Politica, Anna Maria Crispino, the editor of Leggendaria, comments on the drift to the right of Italian politics, and questions the truism that feminism is always ‘left’. Could it be an empty formula? Perhaps the time has come, she concludes, to “place ourselves firmly in another place and adopt another way” (altrove e altrimenti). Leggendaria, she hopes, is doing precisely this.

The Inediti (Unpublished) section presents for the first time the concrete poems of Sabina Siracusano encapsulated in the artistic renderings of her friend and well known photographer, Carla Viparelli. Each one is an ironic portrait of women they know - “biograffiti” as Siracusano calls them.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the Speciale section is devoted to Arundhati Roy’s moving and disturbing essay on genocide, motivated by the one year anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian activist Hrant Dink, as well as by the recent events in the Indian Gujarat region, and delivered at a conference in Istanbul in January of this year. The essay is translated into Italian and edited by Laura Corradi. The grasshoppers of the title, ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’, were allegedly interpreted locally as a premonition of the Armenian genocide, after whole villages were devastated by an attack. Roy’s central thesis is that all genocides have a socio-economic basis and are set in motion in the name of progress and wellbeing – for a part of the population at the cost of the other part. The ‘normality’ of the tragic events she does not hesitate to call genocide in 2002, when thousands of Muslims were killed by nationalist Hindus in Gujarat, was what set her thinking: were the massacre of Native Americans, the death of millions of Africans during the slave trade and the deaths in Hiroshima simply earlier versions of today’s concept of ‘collateral damage’? And is the situation in the occupied territories behind the new Israeli security wall a genocide in slow motion, shot on camera?

The second Graphic column, inaugurated in the previous issue, returns to manga, but concentrates this time on a manga cartoon produced by an American women, Amy King Ganter. ‘Sorcerers and Secretaries’ effectively reverses stereotypes, Loredana Lipperini claims, with a protagonist who studies economics but in her spare time writes fantasy.

Ivana Pintadu describes a ‘Tri-cycle’ festival in Sardinia, where three phases (or three cycles, as the title suggests) came together to challenge the prevailing political climate. In the first, the Vagina Monologues were presented to an enthusiastic audience, in the second, a documentary by Barbara Galandi on women and elections was shown, followed by a debate, and in the third a book on Bildungsroman and women, edited by Paola Bono and Laura Fortini, was presented, also followed by a debate on the two Italian feminist journals, Leggendaria and Donna Woman Femme (DWF), in the presence of Paola Bono and Anna Maria Crispino.

The Primo Piano section, as usual, examines a great variety of books that have recently been published, re-published or translated from other languages. Lia Giachero looks at Vita Sackville- West’s travel diaries, ‘Passenger to Teheran’ (1926) and ‘Twelve Days’ (1928). Clearly her solid credentials as the gardener of Knowle, the wife of Harold Macmillan and as a member of the English nobility gave her the strength to be herself, both in her sexual orientation and in her writing, Giachero comments, but this does not detract from the interest of her comments on the Persia of her days, “always on the edge between ecstasy for the natural beauty or for the archeological remains, and disgust for the unhygienic conditions.”

Nadia Tarantini talks about a relatively new phenomenon in Italy: audiobooks. While the US publishes 25,000 titles a year, and European countries such as the UK and Germany more like 15,000, Italy has a mere 200 titles available, owing mostly to problems with unreformed copyright legislation. And yet, the idea is catching on, with three publishers particularly active: Emons Audiolibri, Il Narratore Audiolibri and Full Color Sound.

Toni Maraini reviews Piera Mattei’s new collection of short stories, Malinconia animale (Animal Melancholy), while Anna Maria Crispino presents Dunja Badnjevic’s harrowing book recalling her father’s internment in the Croatian concentration camp at Jasenovac. Born in Belgrade, Dunja has lived in Italy for the past 40 years, and like Altounian’s book reviewed in the previous issue on her father’s survival of the Armenian genocide, has decided recently to come to terms with the past and write a biographical history of the period.

Luciana Tavernini places Ada Celico’s intense new novel, Una Casa di Carta, firmly in the tradition of women writing publicly about the very private pain of a mother’s death, illness or suicide, while Federica Giardini reviews a new book by Rosi Braidotti that explores many of the ethical tensions that dominate today’s debate: gender and identity polarisation, the effect of bioengineering on our bodies and on nature, and the search for new ways of interpreting subjectivity. Silvia Lutzoni reviews the same book that was the subject of debate in Sardinia, edited by Paola Bono and Laura Fortini, and discusses how the concept of Bildungsroman can be extended to cover the idea of self-discovery and education inherent in many novels written by Arab women. While the few books published in Italian tend to confirm the worst stereotypes about veiled Muslim women, Lutzoni comments, these essays reveal, through the work of the Egyptian feminists Latìfa al-Zayyàt and Nawal al-Sa’dawi, how the transition from girlhood to maturity is as significant in forming a network of relations as it is in the western world. Nadia Tarantini reviews the Italian translation of a book by the Canadian Alissa York,’The Fourth Wife’, which is set in Utah in 1867 and tells the story of a Mormon massacre, while Lorella Reale looks at the lasting influence of Mary Shelley’s fantastic monster Frankenstein on generations of feminist fantasy and science fiction writers. Finally, closing the Primo Piano section, we have a review of Silvana Grasso’s short stories by Alessandra Reale, an autobiography of an Italian communist woman, Ines Arciuolo, reviewed by Sara Poletto, and many other suggestions for summer reading. The illustrations for the section are by Giusi Francesca Licari, an artist and sculptress who divides her time between Milan and Sciacca, Sicily.

 LEGGENDARIA 68
“The Italians”

In this edition of Leggendaria, the debate focuses on reactions to the april-2008 political elections and, in particular, to the previous number on “Women, Politics and Violence”, the subject of lively discussion at several meetings around the country. The main topic, or Tema, of this edition is the contribution of women to Italian literature, Italian readership, and Italian literary criticism over a span of four centuries, entitled “Le Italiane”. The Bibliomap examines the same subject from the point of view of the historical novel, autobiographies and women Petrarchists. A new rubric entitled “Graphic” opens with this number, inaugurated by Loredana Lipperini who examines women Manga artists and the Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi’s contribution to our understanding of the history and culture of her country.

In the opening section dedicated to the political debate, Anna Maria Crispino and Silvia Neonato describe the twofold sensation of shock, on the one hand, and déja vu, on the other, after the outright victory of Berlusconi’s right wing coalition in the national elections. “It is always embarrassing to find oneself playing the role of Cassandra,” they write but the disastrous result for the left, they feel, hinged on the failure to address many of the issues raised in the previous number of Leggendaria. The debate as to how to transform the presence of women in politics into more than just a question of representation is still alive. While Silvia Neonato compares two examples of women politicians on two ends of the political spectrum, Bia Sarasini speculates on the importance of finding a female “form” for women’s political expression, claiming that traditional “male” models, such as the current obsession with issues of security and national identity, feed on “negative passions such as fear and rage” which suggest no way forward for women. Sarasini concludes that alongside representation, inter-generational exchange is also essential: “we have a lot to learn as well as a lot to teach.” In the same spirit, Anna Rosa Buttarelli closes the political section by stating baldly: “we must invent an unexpected relationship between women who want to play an active role in politics and those who do not, but who feel an urgent need to combat…the dangerous fallacy, still alive and well, that if only there were more women in politics things would change for the better.”

Opening the Tema section on “Le Italiane”, Anna Maria Crispino reviews Women’s Writing in Western Europe. Gender, Generation and Legacy, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle (2007) which examines three crucial issues in literary gender studies in order to understand how women’s literary production has responded to political, social and demographic change in Europe. The Tema section, Crispino writes, is an attempt to provide preliminary answers to an equivalent set of questions for Italian women writers and critics, especially because Italian academia and school teaching is dominated by a rigid approach based on literary canons and “history of literature” text books. One of the main findings of the book, exemplified in the essay, “Recalcitrant Daughters: The Search for Literary Mothers in Italian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s”, Crispino notes, is that the “fundamental metaphor of intergenerational – mother-daughter -exchange” gives way to an idea of “a multiplicity of voices” and a variety of legacies.

Adriana Chemello (University of Padoa) attempts to knock down the traditional “pedestal”, or “mausoleum dedicated to femininity”, as Cutrufelli puts it in her introduction to her book on Olympe de Gouges. As far as women were concerned, literature, in Chemello’s view, was “a continuous discourse on an absence”. The trend today is to re-discover, or uncover, these invisible contributors: readers, commentators, “silent archives” of “mute words”. She too critiques Italian academia and its “virile” and “muscular” resistance to contamination, “safe-guarding the fences surrounding ‘literature’, placing the discipline like a closed icon inside a glass case”.  While gender and intercultural studies represent a “frontier of contemporary knowledge”, she prefers to consider herself a researcher in Italian literature who has dedicated her working life to women writers and to teaching “the formative value of literature”.

The experience of Adalgisa Giorgio, co-editor of Women’s Writing in Western Europe, teaching at the University of Bath, forms the basis of her article, “In a network of connections”. Working in a Department of European Studies, which hosts a Centre for Women’s Studies of which she is Director, in a British University, is a very different experience from that of her colleagues in Italian academia. Women’s Studies and Gender Studies are well represented, well funded and recognised as being an essential part of both research and the curriculum. By contrast, she argues, perhaps the trans-national and comparative approach she is forced to adopt means she has little opportunity for exchange with specialists in Italian literature. By the same token, Giorgio concludes ironically, Women’s Studies are often considered by colleagues as regarding only women, whereas “what men study and write is considered to regard everyone.”

Tatiana Crivelli teaches Italian literature in Zurich University and laments the fragmentation that the Swiss federation imposes on academic life. There is no continuity from Canton to Canton: everything changes, from the school curriculum, to the language, to the political and academic objectives. Although Italian is the third national language in Switzerland, a student who wanted to complete a degree exclusively in Italian literature would find only half the country’s universities able to fulfil the requirements. Within these universities, moreover, only traditional methodologies, such as philology and linguistics, would be available. Gender studies, with their marked inter-disciplinarian character, are still far from established, though a recent university reform, hopefully, will allow new curricular contents to be experimented.

Clotilde Barbarulli (Sil, Florence) examines the way opera and melodrama changed attitudes to women. Through the seductive medium of their voice, women gained centre stage in an age that preached that women should be silent, their femininity “a subtle perfume”, and leave to men the “virile solidity of the mind.” (Luigi Capuana). The angel of the hearth and the femme fatale were the opposites of good and evil that women oscillated dangerously between, and yet, Barbarulli notes, “all the women are massacred in the operas we love”. While passion is exalted, the idea of sacrifice and renunciation is central. In this way, Barbarulli underlines, real women in the audience could identify with their heroines on stage. Melodrama gave voice to the nineteenth century popular novel and shared its ideological apparatus: women readers and spectators were permitted to dream of passion as long as they abided by the conventions of their time in their everyday life.

In a similar vein, Alessandra De Martino-Cappuccio explores the reasons for the expansion of women readers throughout the nineteenth century. It was generally believed that literature could be edifying for Christian women, as wives and mothers, especially among the lower classes, because it was a means to maintain social order and control. In the second half of the century, national education began to include women and literacy rates shot up: in the UK in 1850, De Martino-Cappuccio writes, 70 percent of men and 55 percent of women were able to read (in Italy, however, 75.8 percent of women were still illiterate in 1861). The reduction in working hours after the Industrial Revolution also contributed to the rise of the popular novel, together with a new social requirement: realism, both in language and in the scenes portrayed. Italy lagged behind, De Martino-Cappuccio comments, owing to its “economic backwardness, poverty, disinterest of families and opposition from the Church”. The risk of educating women, in the patronising eyes of the ruling class, was to “encourage ideas of emancipation and liberation from household duties that were of vital importance for maintaining domestic order.” In Italy, moral literature was the answer, but translations of Dumas, Austen and Zola also circulated. Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi was the first Italian novel that combined realism and Christian piety and represented characters from different social classes, including the most humble, though Gramsci noted that Manzoni’s detached superiority was patronising, and that people considered the book “an act of devotion rather than a popular epic.” While reading began to be established as a form of pleasure, it was inevitably considered to have “two dangerous qualities:  it was silent and it was private,” which meant that it could not be controlled. Two popular Italian genres that contributed to maintaining social order were books on etiquette and good manners, and books extolling the virtues of home economics. These were written by women for women and, while confirming the “sexist ideology based on the notion of the separation of spheres between men and women,” they also invited women to become “experts” in their specific sphere. In the last thirty years of the century, women finally broke out of this sphere and appropriated literature for themselves, exploiting in particular the genres that gave voice to their inner lives: novels, autobiography, diaries, letters. And yet, Italian women writers such as Neera and Matilde Serao were against women’s liberation, considering their lives an exception. The final section of De Martino-Cappucci’s article traces the development of the representation of women reading in the visual arts in Italy: the idea that reading could ‘transport’ and ‘absorb’ women’s minds was a common theme, as some of the images accompanying the article show.

Giulia Ponsiglione’s piece on Arcangela Tarabotti, a Venetian nun born in 1604 and forced into the cloister at the age of thirteen, shows how writing can become a personal and political weapon against the superior social power of men. Self taught, Arcangela transformed her “odious prison” into a complex network of relationships and correspondence by ignoring “the double prohibition: silence and renunciation.” Her most scandalous work was On the Tyranny of Fathers, published after her death and with a pseudonym, in which she decried the practice of forced vows and blamed the ignorance in which women are forcibly kept for their state of dependence and social weakness. Her literary vocation became a substitute for her forced religious vocation, and gave her power, “to pick up a pen, because I cannot brandish a sword”. Interestingly, however, Ponsiglione notes, Tarabotti uses ‘feminine’ strategies in her rhetoric in order to defend herself from criticism and counterattack her enemies: “in her correspondence she alternates between acceptance, even ostentation of, her limits and supreme pride in her intellectual achievement.”

Adriana Chemello comments on a new facsimile edition of Luisa Bergalli’s collection of poets, first published in Venice in 1726, with a new critical apparatus and bibliography by Chemello herself. Born in 1703, Bergalli was a poet, playwright, translator and critic who made it her life’s work to collect and publish the work of fellow poets, including a fair number of lesser-known women.

Luisa Ricaldone (University of Turin) examines the colourful and audacious life of Annie Vivanti, born in London in 1866 of a German mother and Italian father and educated in Switzerland, the UK, the United States and Italy. Her polyglot, bohemian life led her to break with conventions - “I have no mother country, all the earth is mine” she would repeat – and introduced her to the intellectual circles of her day. Her literary production, as well as her theatrical personality and chameleon nature, gave rise to the expression ‘vivantism’: the ability to be and not to be, to appear and disappear, to be sexually ambiguous.

Laura Fortini’s (University of Sassari) article on Grazie Deledda and the conferences that took place for the 80th anniversary of her Nobel Prize, grapples with the mixed reception the Sardinian writer has always met with in her country. Fortini comments that the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Sibila Aleramo’s book, Una donna, passed unnoticed, despite the fact that Aleramo was in many ways a forerunner of women’s literary production in Italy. The problem, Fortini concludes, is that neither Aleramo nor Deledda fit into “normal definitions”. While Aleramo’s life was deliberately anti-conformist, Deledda’s was ‘normal’ and ‘private’. It must have taken great courage, Fortini says, to break out of the restricted circles of provincial life, and this courage fed her writing, which was based on “her mother land, and the men and women who live there”. In Deledda’s books, mothers are “undomesticated in patriarchal culture and are therefore at the centre of a path towards liberty. Paola Pittalis concentrates on Deledda’s short stories in her short article: the recent conference in Sassari focussed on the six volumes of more than 200 novellas that are already known to the public, but, it seems, there are many more to be studied and researched.

A short article by Anna Maria Crispino on the Neapolitan intellectual and journalist, Matilde Serao, friend of Croce, Pirandello and Bracco and founder, with her husband, Edoardo Scarfoglio, of the daily newspaper Il Mattino is the penultimate piece in the “Tema” section. In a letter to her grand-daughter, Matilde recommended alternating “the pen and the needle,” believing that public and private could thus “be reconciled”.

The Topic “Le Italiane” concludes with a long article by Nadia Setti (University of Paris VIII) on Elsa Morante and, in particular, a book published in 2006 by Purdue University Press edited by Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood: Under Arturo’s Star. The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante. While Elsa Morante is often considered in Italy an “isolated genius”, this book “places her firmly in a series of cultural and intellectual contexts, and shows the blend of canonical and innovative, orthodox and heterodox elements in her work.

The Bibliomap on “Le Italiane” offers a brief panorama of Italian women writers in three important genres: the historical novel, autobiography and Women Petrarchists. Maria Vittoria Vittori examines historical novels by Anna Banti, Maria Bellonci, Eliana Bouchard, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, and Dacia Maraini, among others. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was perhaps the first historical novel written by a woman to capture the imagination and reveal the potential of the genre. A historical novel, Vittori notes, provides the opportunity to explore a “twin otherness: one that is born from a different historical epoch, and one that relates to the other world represented by women.” There is the added chance to find echoes with the present, by examining contemporary issues such as gender, culture, identity and religion. Autobiography, the second genre to be taken into consideration, produces similar reverberations between past and present, the self and the other. In Giuliana Masserville’s definition of an autobiography – “a prose account of an individual life where there is identification between narrator, author and protagonist in a retrospective view” – tries to put rest to doubts that have always been expressed as to the subjectivity, and therefore non-verifiability of an autobiographical account. While the earliest examples of the “autobiographical impulse” in women are religious, autobiography flourishes as a genre in the nineteenth century, as Franco D’Intino’s studies have shown, especially among categories that were experiencing a conflict of authority: emigrants, slaves, workers, and women. The genre suited women, Estelle Jelinek has claimed, because they are more willing to “deconstruct” and question themselves. Women’s autobiographies thus, in her view, provide an alterative to the ‘exemplary life’ genre, more suited to men. Biographies of women written by women are a further example of the possible interaction between biographer and subject. The third and final genre in the Bibliomap gives a full bibliography of books published in the last ten years, and conferences organised over the same period on women Petrarchists. Giulia Ponsiglione claims that these women sonnet writers are ample proof that the ‘Laura complex’ of the silent woman is to be refuted.

The new Graphic column is dedicated to Japanese mangaka, women manga cartoonists who are revolutionising cartoon production and readership by creating strong female protagonists, and to the highly successful film adaptation of the Iranian artist, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic book Persepolis.

The “Primo Piano” section returns to the historical novel, and in particular the production of Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, in Nadia Tarantini’s article, ‘Women of the Century’, followed by two pieces by Bia Sarasini on Hilda Doolitle, and by Sara Poletto on the diaries of Elena Carandini, respectively. Claudia Vitale’s article segues on the recent SIL conference, which was devoted to debating private space (the inner mind, the domestic sphere, the mother tongue) and public space (globalisation, the world outside, patriarchal society, otherness). In another article, Sara Poletto examines the contribution made by Flora Annie Steel to translating and popularising Indian folk tales at the end of the nineteenth century. Silvia Neonato reviews the tragic diary of an Armenian survivor of Turkish ethnic cleansing, written in 1921 and published in Italy in 2007 by his psychoanalyst daughter, Janine Altounian. Other recommended books are by Miranda Miranda, Adriana Assini, Eileen Favorite, Valeria Parella, the Pakistani Tahmina Anam, Severino Santiapichi and Katherine Dunn. To conclude, Paola Bono looks at the second 2007 review produced by the Naples University Doctorate on Gender Studies, and Lia Giachero examines Cristina De Stefano’s book on seven ‘Adventurous American Women’.

Leggendaria comes to a close with the Theatre section, dedicated to four life stories, dramatised by the playwriter Maria Inversi and set to music, of children whose will to survive overcomes their difficulties, and finally with the “Under-15” section, devoted to a book on sex education for adolescents edited by the popular children’s writer Bianca Pitzorno, two children’s books on Japan and Chile, and a children’s poetry book by Donatella Bisutti.

LEGGENDARIA 67
"Women Politics Violence"
76 pages, 10 euro

This special election issue of Leggendaria tries to address the question: when we talk about politics what should we be talking about? The question may seem philosophical, but in this period in Italy – if not the world over -  there is a very strong rejection of politics and politicians, among women in particular.  The answer provided by many women is to form committees, movements, and associations and adopt ideas that place their everyday life at the centre of political life rather than at the margins, striving to find practical solutions to their problems. The crisis of male dominated politics is visible to us all: the challenge is to transform politics into activism. This issue of Leggendaria is a preliminary contribution.

Anna Maria Crispino opens the issue with a long article on politics and violence, especially against women. The verbal violence that women are subjected to in Italy on a daily basis has reached proportions that would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. There is a new reactionary climate, propagated by Pope Ratzinger and right-wing parties, as well as the odious pro-life campaigner, Giuliano Ferrara, who has launched a proposal for a moratorium on abortion along the lines of the proposed moratorium of the death penalty. Together they have launched an unprecedented attack on the abortion law (Law 194), and on reproductive rights and civil liberties in this country. The writer, Dacia Maraini claims Italy has turned back the clock by at least 30 years, and the feminist journalist, Ida Dominijanni, finds parallelswith the past, when “there was a natural enmity between women and the modern State.” Our bodies have thus become the new “res publicae”. Technological progress, together with bio-technological business, once seen as an ally for reproductive rights, in recent proposals has become another enemy, threatening to keep fetuses alive against their mother’s will. As Crispino points out, the message is worrying, and many feel it is nothing short of a declaration of war: responsible procreation is women’s responsibility and if they fail, they will pay, for the rest of their lives. The debate among women is how to combat this new crusade against women. Crispino suggests working on representation, increasing the number of women politicians – despite their instinctive rejection of politics – and tapping into women’s movements, especially those devoted to green issues and political non-violence, exploiting their activism to change the language and approach of traditional politics.

Assunta Sarlo uses the example of the Milan demonstration, Usciamo dal Silenzio, (Let’s start talking) held on January 14th  2006 in defense of the abortion law 194, to confirm that women have reached a point of no return. Just as in the past, women are ready to act collectively when the stakes are very high. They may be outside official structures such as parties or political organizations, but they are still working together with a common goal: to raise awareness, in particular of the younger generation of women who may take their acquired rights for granted, of the dangers of this new climate of intolerance.

Anna Simone explores the new frontiers of bio-politics in her article entitled: ‘We’re playing with the bodies of women and migrant workers.’ Again, the theme is the renewed interest of reactionary politics in women’s bodies, in repressing sexual freedom of expression, in controlling sexual and reproductive rights, and in suppressing the liberties and rights of migrant workers. “The violence of politics has been unleashed against women’s bodies,” Simone writes, underlining the contrast today with 1970s feminism, when “the patriarchal context of the State was clear” and the archetype was a white, 35 year old factory worker, father of a family and bread winner.” This figure is no longer relevant, and the role of the State has been weakened, Simone concludes. Bio-power, the power to control individuals and their bodies, and through them the important narratives of life and death, is all that is left.

Lea Melandri explores ‘The Missing Links’ in the feminist debate today, claiming that feminist politics and culture is so fragmented that little has been done to fight the political stereotype that the most important social intervention is to help women reconcile work and family – as if the family were the concern exclusively of women, and as if care workers were by definition women. In the meantime, politics is ‘men’s business’.The union leader, Susanna Camusso, in an interview by Silvia Neonato, points to the system of political designations as being responsible for the gender gap in Italian politics. Politicians co-opt those similar to them, thus excluding women and young people. Furthermore, the language of journalism and both the choice of subject-matter and the hierarchy of the news does little to change these stereotypes. Journalists and politicians represent two castes which are impermeable to women.

Maria Grosso reviews an important piece of research published by IRES, a research institute directed by Giovanna Altieri, which compares gender differences in paid and unpaid work across Europe, and in particular in Denmark, Lithuania and Iceland. The international definition of ‘unpaid work’ eliminates once and for all the idea that housewives do not work, Grosso states. Balancing work and home life is not just a matter for women, but for the whole of society. Paradoxically, while Italy defends the abstract concept of ‘family’ it has one of the lowest female participation rates in Europe, one of the lowest fecundity rates, as well as a weak welfare state that leaves the onus of care giving to individual families and increasingly ‘flexible’ labor solutions that, far from improving work-life balance, make life far more difficult – especially for women, on whose shoulders 77.7% of responsibility for care giving falls.

On a more philosophical note, Federica Giardini explores the implications of the contrast between hierarchical, institutional structures, which are vertical, and the horizontal nature of relationships within society and within families or cohabiting  units. In her view, when we talk about politics we should be talking about the order and disorder of relationships, in which we are all “citizens without sovereignty.”

Silvia Neonato reviews a surge of books recently published four decades after 1968 which examine the impact of those years on today, and the nostalgia, mixed with disappointment and disillusionment, that is their legacy. Quoting the film director, Cristina Comenicini, “we shouldn’t mythologize the period, as if it could never happen again.” We should accept the passing of time, Dario Firtilio, among others, concludes in his novel focusing on the figure of Che Guevara, without becoming cynical and without forgetting.

Domenico Starnone, by contrast, explores the sentiments that are alive today remembering that period, reconstructing why some felt that violence could be justified. Until a younger generation writes about 1968, Starnone concludes, we will not have an objective view. In an article entitled ‘A Tangle of Passions’ Anna Maria Crispino looks at books by Raffaella Battaglini and Toni Negri, Anna Santoro and Laura Bocci, again dealing with the late 60s and early 70s. In the first, written together, Battaglini and Negri reconstruct, with theatrical dialogues, a triangular relationship between a woman exploring feminism, a man convincing himself that alternative political tools might be the answer to combat established power, and an ‘intruder’, who has already chosen the path of clandestine violence. Santoro’s novel, ‘Carla’s Friends’, set in Naples, as well as Bocci’s, ‘Sensitive to Pain’, focus on women during that period, on their friendships, relationships, and their own relationship to their bodies and their psyche. Twenty years after the publication of Luisa Passerini’s book, ‘Self-Portrait of a Group’, a new edition has just come out, as Roberta Mazzanti writes. The book was influential among women at the time because it combined fiction, autobiography and history, and “turned life upside-down.” A film by Alina Marazzi also stresses the importance of the period in the history of women, combining in a similar fashion, rigorous documentary, voices off, and everyday life to form a universal story.

In the Media and Communications section, Monica Luongo comments ironically on the way women are represented by the press in Italy. Women are absent in political journalism but present in television armchairs, usually dressed skimpily and flirting with the (ideally male) spectators. The lives of normal women are absent in advertising, but they are present as the emanations of (male) fantasy, licking everything they can get their hands on, rubbing up against any male. Or when they have a ‘problem’, eating yoghurt. Otherwise women figure in newspapers or in the television news as objects of violence, domestic or otherwise, or as diabolic instigators of violence in weak men (as in the case of the ‘witch’ Amanda Knox in the recent Perugia student murder case. Nadia Tarantini conducted a research project with her students on the representation of women in the press and reports her findings in her article, ‘Feminism went by in vain’. The hierarchy of material reflects the patriarchal nature of the Italian media, as does the length of time information stays news-worthy. A case in point: the demonstration in defense of the abortion law was covered by national television but the commentary was not about the content or aim of the demonstration; the journalist’s only interest was in the fact that female ministers were booed off stage. The implication was that angry, separatist feminism was back.

In the History section, Ivana Rinaldi reviews recent historical production, in particular women’s history, and discusses the disagreements that divide women historians in Italy. On one side there is the view that micro-history is an important aspect of women’s history, because it explores aspects of daily life that politics tends to ignore. On the other, it is strongly believed that it is essential to explore issues linked with political power, or the lack of it, in order to make progress. Rinaldi also reports the debate in the US on gender history, which does not only apply to women as a biologically determined category, but to many different categories. “The process of hybridization underway at a global and a local level,” she writes, “should not be expressed by a single privileged category; but rather by a combination of categories of difference, such as gender, generation, bodies, the color of our bodies, cultural and religious belongingness".

For the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth, Giuliana Misserville debates the current implications of ‘The Second Sex’, especially in view of the demonstration organized in Paris by Julia Kristeva and the contemporary publication of a nude photograph of SdB by the daily Libération to polemicize with the demonstration and somehow desecrate her figure. De Beauvoir, Kristeva pointed out at the centenary conference, was the first to delineate the divergence between male and female desire, but she was also the first to claim that a relationship between a man and a woman could show reciprocal respect. Misserville reviews several studies of De Beauvoir, by Toril Moi, Mona Ozouf, Ingrid Galster, Eva Gothlin, Danièle Sallenave, as well as a new edition of SdB’s ‘Cahier de Jeunesse’, edited by her adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon. The article comments on SdB’s particular brand of existentialism, the influence of her American experience, and in particular of her Afro-American friends, on her universalism, and recent attempts to prove not only that her thought was independent of Sartre but even that she was his precursor. Misserville concludes by examining the role that SdB played in the Italian feminist debate from the 1960s to the present day, reconstructed by Liliana Rampello in the preface to a forthcoming new edition of ‘The Second Sex’.

The 2006 SIL summer seminar featured a round table discussion with Rossana Rossanda - one of the most influential political and intellectual figure in Italy - on her book ‘The Girl from the Century Before’, an autobiographical narration. The Special this issue reports the discussion, moderated by Laura Fortini, focusing on the idea of excess.  Rossanda’s political passion has animated her life, and politics created a gap between her body and her self, as an individual, and her involvement in the ‘body politic’ and, in particular, of the life of the Italian Communist Party, Fortini observes. “It is as if, faced by the world, a woman’s body disappears, and cannot exist without a political structure”. Rossanda answers that the Party, and the newspaper she worked for all her life, Il Manifesto, did not represent a unified vision of life for her; they were always “tragic” in the sense that they represented  unresolved and insoluble complexity. The body politic, she claims, contains many different bodies, that are held together by a project, by hope in the future, but which interact, creating friction. The experience of her life, she concludes is similar. Biancamaria Frabotta comments that Rossanda’s experience was from inside and outside

at the same time, because she writes from a woman’s point of view. It is a narrative that unifies all the various strands of the past century. Anna Maria Crispino adds that Rossanda’s ability to view historical events through the subjective lens of her own experience owes more to the feminist tradition than to the Party, and that, from this point of view, women like Rossanda were a model for other feminists. In her response, Rossanda defends both the Communist and the Feminist traditions and deplores the fact that both have become the object of derision, if not revisionism. This was a motivating force in her writing. The younger Cristina Bracchi confirms that Rossanda’s articles in Il Manifesto inspired her to seek out other women and hear their voices, and gave her strength to use women as models in her teaching. Eleonora Chiti confirms that the intellectual movement in Italy starting in 1968 was dominated by older men, while Bia Sarasini remembers that boys and girls were still in separate classes at school, and the participation of women in demonstrations was still considered scandalous. Interestingly enough, Rossanda concludes, the book has met with greater success among younger women and men than among Communists. This means it is important to reinterpret the past, but consider the past as over and done with, with no regrets. “I would like to see what happens in the world in the next 20 years, but disembodies, because … an old body is a real pain!”

Adriana Nannicini tells us about the 2007 summer schools of SIL (Società delle Letterate) and SIS (Società delle Storiche). The theme for the women of letters was, “Money, accounting for desire”, while the women historians examined the subject of women’s labour, from the point of view of the topics “Rights, Migrations and Identity.” As always, the summer schools included representatives of all ages and were concrete examples of participatory political practice, where workshops, seminars and evening discussions were interchangeable and without a pre-established hierarchy. Another workshop, on intercultural mediation, was a unique opportunity for Federica Turco to spend a week concentrating on the theme of “Performativity of Affection”: to what extent do our passions guide our political, social and personal actions?

Monica Ruocco provides a fascinating overview of the role of women, and in particular of women writers, in the Palestinian struggle. Militant writing does not detract from the ‘aesthetics’ of their resistance, as Sahar Khalifah’s writing clearly demonstrates. The Palestinian question, and the idea of identity, and the struggle against occupation, dominate Palestinian women’s writing across the generations: from the post-1967 militant writers to the younger, post-Intifadah novelists who believe that survival also depends on creating an aesthetic dimension. One difference between the generations, as Adania Shibli has pointed out, lies in the geographical imagination of Palestine: for the pan-Arab younger generations their country extends ideally to Cairo, Baghdad, Tunis and Beirut, where many of them were brought up in exile. As the US born Randa Jarrar comments in her blog, the borders of Palestine have shrunk down to a claustrophobic room, as if the

concept of ‘Palestine’ were a personal dimension.

Bia Sarasini reflects on two new short stories about the ‘invisibility’ of two old women by the Indian Bengali writer, Mahasweta Devi, recently translated into Italian by Ambra Pirri, and on an essay on translating by the post-colonial Indian critic,  Gayatri Spivak, which exalts the figure of the ‘Reader as Translator’. Standard translations, Spivak writes, tend to flatten and sterilize the rhetoric of non-western authors; this rhetoric is, in her view, an intrinsic part of the autonomous subjectivity of the speaker. Feminist translators should be aware that translating is an ethical act that allows them to underline the differences between women, as well as the stratifications of power relations, class, and gender. Translating this plurality of voices into Italian is a real challenge, which Pirri has met very well.

In her article on maternity, pregnancy and childbirth, Lorella Reale explores the theme from the point of view of three novels, by A.S. Byatt, Colm Toibin and Concita De Gregorio, and psychoanalytical and bioethical research: from the alienating experience of giving birth in the 1960s to today’s biotechnology, where pregnant women in comas can be kept alive until they give birth, and then detached from their machines, to a more profound discussion of what makes a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ mother.

In her article on variants of global languages, Alessandra Riccio looks at literature from the Iberian peninsular in its many variations, colonial and post-colonial, from catalan (Jaume Cabré), to Angolan Portuguese (in particular the novels of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho), to Argentinian (Eduardo Belgrano, who writes about his old grandmother), while Nicoletta Buonapace reviews the highly introspective novel by the Neapolitan, Agnese Seranis, ‘Getting Lost in Lunar Thoughts’. In her review of the Moroccan born author and philosophy professor, Muriel Barbery’s ‘The Elegance of a Sea Urchin’ Nadia Tarantini explores the reasons for the book’s success in France. Giulia Dalla Negra goes back in time and reviews a new edition of Dumas’s classic, ‘The Women’s War’.

Federico Bastiani meets Marina Dos Santos and talks about the million or so campesinos ‘Sem Terra’ (without land) waiting to have their claims to ownership of the land they have cultivated for generations recognized officially by the Brazilian government.

 

LEGGENDARIA 66
"In vetrina"
nov/dec 2007


This special edition of Leggendaria is an end of year gift for all our readers, in the hope that they will widen the circle of our subscribers either by giving a subscription to friends and family, or simply spread the word that Leggendaria contains everything you'll ever need to know about culture, women and Italy and much more besides! As well as our usual survey that are worth knowing about, this edition launches a new column called "What are we talking about when we talk about politics?" with a piece by Maria Di Rienzo. The idea is to provide a focus for our community of readers, so that they can listen to one another and give voice to the growing need, that we have perceived very clearly during our presentations, to transform politics into practice. For your comments, please write to Indirizzo e-mail protetto dal bots spam , deve abilitare Javascript per vederlo , the same address you can use to subscribe to another new initiative, our newsletter. Starting in January 2008, you will have the chance to keep in touch and to know in advance about upcoming editions, projects and events. This has been an incredibly full year: the issue on Memories last January, March's number dedicated to Genoa and Liguria, the May edition on Making Books, the bilingual monograph on Peru this Summer which we presented at the Lima Book Fair, and, most recently, October's The Body and Beyond. In order to carry on bringing you such quality despite our small size, we need your help and support. One hundred new subscriptions, and the ship Marina Cianetti has depicted for our subscription campaign can proudly keep on sailing.

This end of year special gift edition, which surveys over 100 books that have come out during the year or are worth re-reading in a new context, dedicates its anthology section to the 2007 Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing: "that epicist of the female experience who, with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny", as the motivation reads. The 34th woman to win the prize in the 106 years of its existence, in her Prize Lecture on December 7th, Lessing described the contrast between a dirt poor Zimbabwe school, where everyone was hungry for books, and a privileged North London school where the boys could hardly provide the images in their mind to match her description. At one point she observed: "We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers." Since the Golden Notebook in 1962, Lessing has subjected her scrutiny to a "divided civilization": men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor. Under the Skin, her autobiography, details all the phases of this struggle, seen from her very personal point of view, as the title suggests. To honour Lessing's victory, Leggendaria represents Antonia Byatt's 1995 article examining her life and works, together with some pieces from the Italian feminist journal Noi Donne written in the late 1980s by the translator of the article, Maria Antonietta Saracino.


In the first Primo Piano section, Itala Vivan presents Italian translations of the work of another woman who has played a role in the same geopolitical area: the Afrikaner poet, Antjie Krog, born in Free State, South Africa, in 1952. Following the trials of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for national radio and television gave her a new voice, veined with the awareness of collective responsibility and the deep crisis of the Afrikaners. Her 1998 Country of My Skull recounts her journey into hell, where her Afrikaner identity is painfully linked with the destiny of her fellow countrymen, their blood and tears. Vivan presents her translations of Country of grief and grace, Land, Poet becoming, Toilet poem, Body Bereft, Colonialism of a special kind, all taken from her more recent collections, Down to my Last Skin (2000) and Body Bereft (2006).

In the second section, Silvia Neonato introduces her readers to works written in Italian by Albanians living in Italy - Ornela Vorpsi and Ron Kubati - or translated into Italian from the Albanian, such as the already world reknowned Kadarè and Elvira Dones, who currently lives in Switzerland and the United States. In her latest book, published by Feltrinelli in 2007, Vergine giurata, Dones tells the real story of Hana, a woman who is allowed to become a man, following medieval custom and traditional law designed to solve the problem when no male heirs are born into a family, as long as she is sworn to virginity.

The Incontro section, by Federico Bastiani, meets a young Italian woman, with Egyptian Muslim parents, who writes about the problems of blended cultures, integration and assimilation in today's Italy. Rhanda Ghazi who wrote Dreaming of Palestine when she was only 15, has published a new book now she is 23, Oggi forse non ammazzo nessuno (Today Perhaps I Won't Kill Anyone, Fabbri 2007), with the ironic sub-title, 'Minimalist stories of a young muslim who, strangely enough, is not a terrorist'.

A Primo Piano by Maria Vittoria Vittori is dedicated to Marosia Castaldi's new book Dentro le mie mani le tue - which weaves together stories from the living and from the dead, the wars of the Illiad and personal Odysseys, Infernos and Paradises, all co-existing and co-creating each of our individual experiences - followed by another Primo Piano describing Pascale Voilley's encounter with Jan Morris. Now in her nineties, Jan Morris shows no signs of flagging. Voilley describes being picked up in a flashy sports car when he travelled to meet her in her Welsh cottage made famous in 'A Writer's House in Wales' (2002). Already established as a travel writer, James Morris changed sex in 1972 and became Jan Morris. Her untiring energy, reflected in the fact she still travels a few months a year, and her unfailing discipline requiring her to write 12 pages a day whatever happens, lead Voilley to conclude, with Theroux, who wrote the introduction to 'Jan Morris: Around the World in Eighty Years', that 'Jan is living proof that you don't need to be maniacal to travel'. Perhaps it's a paradox, he says, 'but Jan's sensual, almost ecstatic enthusiasm for life…has made her incredibly sane. She's always going somewhere, but never running away from anything.'

In the Primo Piano section on cinema, Maria Grosso examines Exodus, the British indy film maker Penny Woolcock's latest work presented at the Venice Film Festival in September. Biblical in its scope and emotional impact, the film explores an indefinite but not too distant future 'Dreamland', a prison/ghetto where degradation, marginalisation and discrimination levels everyone to the point that there is no longer any distinction between criminal or deviant behaviour and poverty. Grosso then reviews another film presented in Venice, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, directed by a 19 year old Iranian girl, Hana Makhmalbaf, as well as the Italian satirical actress and film director Sabina Guzzanti's latest film, Le ragioni dell'aragosta.


LEGGENDARIA n. 65 – ott.2007

“Il corpo e oltre”

72 pagine, 10 euro

The “Theme” of this issue of Leggendaria, edited by Bia Sarasini, is ‘The Body and Beyond’. It explores the intimate and archaic relationship between body and spirit in the context of the 2007 edition of the Turin Festival of Spirituality, whose aim this year was to enrich inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue by exploring themes such as ethics and spirituality, as well as proposing workshops, concerts, lectures, readings and practical sessions in yoga, Indian dancing, Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic massage.

In her opening article, Bia Sarasini explores the dichotomy between body and spirit from early Christian religious practice through the crisis of modernity to the present day. Women have always been represented as material, and yet their spiritual dimension cannot be ignored. While in the Bible the word becomes flesh and God becomes Man, women have always been seen as flesh: their function to give birth to new flesh. Their spirit, or psyche, however, has always played an important role. And yet, today, television programs such as ‘Extreme Makeover’, as well as new discoveries such as genetic mapping and the latest biotechnologies, show that there are no limits to technology and that a body is no longer necessarily a product of nature. At the same time the Church plays an increasingly interventionist role in establishing what a woman should or should not do with her body. Reproductive rights have become the new frontier, and body and spirit are increasingly divided. Paradoxically, the post-modern world seeks ‘wellbeing’ in ancient practices invoking the unity of body and spirit, such as yoga, or in the physical pampering of a beauty farm. A woman’s body, Sarasini concludes, continues to represent conflict, iconically represented in the opposition between Western nudity and the Islamic veil. Both are representations of male desire.

In an interview by Silvia Neonato, Antonella Parigi, the president of the Turin Festival of Spirituality, talks about this year’s special sections analyzing the perception of bodies in different religions: ‘The body politic’; ‘The rules of the body’; ‘The body of languages’; ‘Pain and pleasure’ and ‘The body between experience and knowledge’. What we are asking ourselves, Parigi says, is ‘To whom do our bodies belong?’ She believes that the body is the locus that represents the difference between those who have faith and non-believers, and that, in particular, women’s bodies have always been the object of rules and regulations in all world religions.

Gabriella Bonacchi, in her article, ‘The body as an ideological sanctuary’, explores new trends in spirituality and observes that self-help, or wellbeing, has become a physical as well as spiritual practice. Ancient sacred rites, once linked to the sacrifice of spiritual exercise, are now expressed in strict diets, to the point of anorexia – in its turn once the physical expression of spiritual asceticism. The new ‘anthropological’ approach to women’s bodies, with its emphasis on ‘human nature’, contrasts with the historical and social exclusion of women. Starting with Foucault, ‘biopolitics’ has become the new catch phrase.

Rosetta Stella explores the links between faith and women’s religious spirit in traditional mystic literature. Making the distinction between religion and faith, Stella claims that faith has always helped women in their everyday struggle against the adversities of life and responds to a natural tendency to melancholy. Modernity emphasized traditionally male values such as citizenship and its concurrent rights, but, Stella wonders, has the consequent secularization affected women in a different way? Her answer is that, in her view, one of the strongest forces behind the Church’s new role today is its conservative reaction to feminism. Bioethical questions dominate the debate, spreading to the political arena, whereas in the past, these topics were considered strictly private. Conversely, feminism has been pushed into a minority niche, or is viewed as a form of male mimesis.

As a corollary to Stella’s article, Palma Valentina Di Nunno examines the question whether there can be any relationship between mysticism and philosophy. How can a mystic be anything but anti-philosophical, against Reason? The same question, Di Nunno, points out, holds for the relationship between mysticism and mental health. Hildegard of Bingen was considered an early mystic, but at the same time, she was one of the earliest hysterics in the study of women’s mental disease. Di Nunno rejects the ‘neuro-theological’ school of thought, but cannot deny that mystics were ‘mad about Christ’.

Nearly all the illustrations in this issue are of ancient figures of Mother Earth, or Mother Goddesses taken from Ligabue and Rossi-Osmida’s book ‘Mother Goddess’ published by Electa and reviewed here by Chiara Freschi. The figure of a big-hipped, big-busted, often open-legged goddess is an archetype common to nearly all ancient religions and is still present in the pantheon of Indian deities. Vicky Noble and Karen Vogel have explored these representations and their hidden meanings in patriarchal societies, and a recent discovery, illustrated in this book by Rossi-Osnida who was one of the archeologists on the dig, uncovered 165 figures in Turkmenistan. The Mother Goddess, as Marja Gimbutas in her studies has shown, was a symbol of fertility, but cannot ultimately point to a matriarchal culture. The cult of women goddesses was to be replaced by male gods, and just as the statues of mother goddesses glorified their opulent female bodies the figures soon gave way to statues stressing male attributes.

The French sociologist Pierre Pisarra analyzes Byzantine liturgy and its use of the body. Early Eastern Christianity celebrated the body as ‘the temple of the spirit’ and the iconography of temptation, mortification, the wilderness, even the original sin, underlines this intimate link with the corporal aspect of religious practice. On Mount Athos, the practice of ‘hesychia’, inner peace, is highly sought after. It consists in repeating a formula according to the rhythm of your breath, bent double with your head between your legs, but critics thought monks were simply contemplating their navel.

Bia Sarasini interviews Emma Fattorini on her book ‘ Pio XI, Hitler and Mussolini. The Solitude of a Pope.’ In this book Fattorini discusses the delicate question of Pope Pius XI’s illness and how the breakdown of his body might have contributed to his being open to the influence of a saint, Teresa of Lisieux, but at the same time paved the way for differences in opinion, especially with regard to Fascism and Nazism, with his successor, Pius XII. Reactions to the book have been predictably mixed, which disappoints Fattorini, as she feels criticism is based on prejudice. Why can we never talk about the bodies of Popes, she asks?

In a very moving piece, Silvia Neonato talks about accompanying her mother’s death at home. Quoting Elias, Neonato points out that death is no longer a commonplace in the home; bodies are removed to hospitals and kept isolated from the family, and this process of detachment has led to a distancing of the emotions related to death. Modern-day pain therapy has solved the problem of dying in pain, but the quest for spiritual comfort is still very much alive, Neonato claims. Susan Sontag rejects the metaphors of war used in the ‘battle’ against cancer, but accepting death is never easy, even for those with faith. “The last year with you was beautiful”, she whispers in her mother’s ear as she is dying. “Really?” her mother murmers. “Yes, really, and we even managed to have some laughs!”

The Italian translation of an article by Margot Badran published in Countercurrent, October 18, 2006, describes the reaction of Islamic women the world over to contemporary re-interpretations of their role in organized religion and in the mosque. Badran describes, in particular, the Muslim Women’s Alliance’s Grand Mosque Equal Access for Women Project against the physical barriers that have been built to separate men and women in mosques; the protests of Saudi Arabian women for not being allowed to walk around the Kaabah, despite Islam’s traditional profession of equality; and the reaction of South African women in early post-apartheid who came down from the balcony into the main hall when the Afro-American theologist, Amina Wahud, was invited to speak before the sermon at Friday’s prayers.

Bia Sarasini interviews the ever-surprising now 64-year-old Erica Jong, guest of the Turin Festival. Amazingly, still today she is attacked by the Christian right in the US for her role in undermining ‘family values’.  A recent autobiography, Seducing the Demon, gives many juicy anecdotes from her past, in which the demon, she confesses, is the truth. On the war in Iraq, Jong speaks out clearly: “They haven’t read Homer, Herodotus or Thycidides. If they had they would know that wars are always the same. Young men, women and children are massacred; old men get rich.”

* In the special central “insert” of this issue, Loredana Magazzeni looks at poetry in the English language, and in particular by Indian women, in which the sari becomes a metaphor for the woven cloth of life. Quoting from two anthologies of poetry devoted to Eros and Desire, here translated into Italian by Andrea Sirotti, and from a new collection by the Indian poet, Sujata Bhatt, translated into Italian by Paola Splendore, Magazzeni focuses on the sari as a topos in women’s life. The length of cloth is passed from mother to daughter or given as a wedding gift; it serves to hide the body, its tight pleats rustling with every movement, but also to reveal it with its tight waist and glimpse of naked flesh. The poems Leggendaria publishes (in English and Italian) are by Sujata Bhatt, Moniza Alvi, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Jayaprabha, Chitra Divakaruni, Imtiaz Dharker, and Anijum Hasan.

* A short piece by Silvia Rulli, with photos by Daniele Cannistrà and Enrico Bruschini, describes this year’s edition of the Santa Rosalia festival in Palermo. A yearly event, with floats, a religious procession, fireworks and lots of food and drink, the city celebrates its patron saint with a vengeance. Saint Rosalia, it seems, saved the city from the Black Plague in 1624, and has been venerated ever since.

 * Itala Vivan interviews Aminatta Forna, a writer whose mother was Scottish and father was from Sierra Leone. Her first book, The Devil that Danced on Water, reconstructed the life and politically-motivated death of her father. Now that her first novel, Ancestral Stones, has been published in English (and shortly in Italian), Forna acknowledges that with a biography you already have a story, whereas with a novel you have to make one up. Forna says that her novel started to take shape while she was researching her father’s history. The stones from the title refer to an archaic, tribal custom no longer in use but recounted by women of her grandmother’s generation, whereby women passed stones onto their daughters in order to preserve their memory. These stones were venerated and when needed used for divining, but Islamic mullahs and Christian missionaries frowned on the ‘pagan’ superstition, and the matrilineal tradition gave way to patriarchal religious practice.

* In the Primo Piano section, Luciana Tavernini reviews a posthumous collection of poetry by Gabriella Lazzerini called ‘The ocean is all mine’.  Maria Vittoria Vittori comments on a new novel by Laura Pariani set in the early 1900s in Buenos Aires, ‘God does not love children’. The beggar-boy protagonist, Ognissanti, was born dirt poor and deformed in the teeming conventillo, home to immigrants and paupers, and thrown out into the streets to survive as only children can, with the energy born of their innocence. Gardens and public space are the focus of Francesca Neonato’s article, ‘Green Microcosms’, while Federica Giardini celebrates the life and work of Angela Putino who died a year ago and who devoted much of her life to the study of Simone Weil.

* Nadia Tarantini, in the Incontro section, meets and talks with Catherine Dunne, a guest of the Rome Literature Festival on an unusually cold summer’s evening. Tarantino spent time with Dunne in southern Spain in a writer’s residence and admired her generosity and absolute dedication to her work. Dunne thanks the Irish climate and her tiny box-room looking out over the back of the house for her passion for books. There was nothing else to do but read, she claims, and let “my imagination explode … so that the little room grew, was transformed, with every new literary discovery.”

 

* The Letture (Readings) section includes reviews of: Silvia Bre’s poetry collection, Marble; Rita Giaretta’s account of her experience in a community of prostitute slaves, mostly young immigrant women, ‘No longer slaves: Casa Rut, the courage of a community’; a bitter-sweet commentary on life with the Neapolitan actor Massimo Troisi by Anna Pavignano, his partner and colleague, Starting tomorrow I’ll get up late; a collection of ten Ligurian poets selected by Roberto Bertoni and Roberto Bugliani; a novel by Marco Vespa, Born by the sea; an unusual collection of word-sketches, as she calls them, traditional haikus by Nadia Agustoni; and finally a new poetry collection by a first-time author, Gaia Danese, called Fragile extremities.

* In the Under-15 section, an Italian fantasy, The alchemist’s keys, and an article about the Turin publisher. EDT, with its recent new collection of children’s books, and, in particular, its new collection devoted to stories from around the world.


LEGGENDARIA 63-64/2007

PERU

(Edition in Italian and Spanish)

abstracts

To celebrate Italy’s presence as guest of honour at the Lima Book Fair (19-29 July, 2007), this special issue of Leggendaria, in Spanish and Italian, is entirely devoted to Perù and its historical, cultural and migratory links with Italy.

Anna Maria Crispino, in her introductory piece, outlines the main features of the “special relationship” between Perù and Italy, from the earliest cultural shock for Europe of the discovery of a New World, to today’s transnational phenomenon, with returning Italian migrants and new Peruvian immigrants keeping the historic and cultural ties alive. Despite the global tendency towards the domination of the US model, Crispino notes, the two countries are bound by deeper ties, which Leggendaria explores and analyses in this special issue.

Julio Ortega, who directs the Transatlantic Project at Brown University, where he teaches Latin American Literature, has made a fascinating contribution to this special issue’s exploration of the ties that bind Italy and Perù. Using the historical iconography of symbols, allegories and emblems he traces the cultural perception of the New World and its indigenous inhabitants. From the cornucopia of abundance offered by the seemingly limitless wealth of the land, literally an El Dorado, to the moral reprehensibility of the savage natives, the imagery is anyway of fertility. Colonisation produced that new phenomenon that is nowadays at the heart of the new transnational model: cultural blending. The art and architecture produced by native civilisations blended with Catholic imagery, absorbing and producing endlessly new versions, which, in their turn, underline the differences between the two worlds.

Patrizia Sentinelli is the Italian deputy foreign minister, responsible for foreign aid. In her article on best practice in international cooperation she underlines the importance of local, grass roots development as a valid alternative to the former model involving vast international infrastructure projects.  In addition to historical ties with the business and entrepreneurial community in Perù, Italy now hosts a sizeable community of Peruvians who live and work in Italy, whose remittances play an important role in local development. Sentinelli says her priorities for Perù are environmental protection, to improve access to water and land and to develop microcredit as a means to help families, and especially women, improve their circumstances and express their capabilities. Conservation and exploration of Perù’s cultural and artistic heritage is another priority.

In Anna Maria Crispino’s interview of Donato Di Santo, undersecretary for foreign affairs, the ties between the two countries are the bedrock of the conversation. With Rome hosting the Third International Conference dedicated to Italian-Latin American and Caribbean relations in October 2007, and Lima organising the European-Latin American Summit in May 2008, Di Santo stresses that the widespread “Italian-ness” of much of Latin America makes his task much easier. Italy has never invaded or conquered Latin America, but Latin America has been the chosen home for generations of Italians, as Italy is now home for many Peruvians. Di Santo hopes to strengthen European ties with Mercosur and, in particular, he stresses, import the model of European social cohesion for the federation of Latin American countries. In another interview with Maria Pia Dradi - an Italian senior aid worker responsible for the Italian-Peruvian Fund created in 2001 and devoted to anti-rural poverty strategies in 12 Andino and Amazonian provinces as well as anti urban poverty strategies in Lima, Arequipa and Cuzco - recent advances in the process of social emancipation in Perù are highlighted. In particular, Dradi comments, the role of women in supporting sustainable development has finally been recognised.

Talking with Carlos Rocca, Peruvian Ambassador in Italy, Crispino explores once again the elective affinities between Italy and Peru. Relations between the two countries, Rocca stresses, have improved with the Prodi government whose centre-left leanings make it naturally more sympathetic to the new generation of leaders such as Lula in Brazil, Bachelet in Chile and, of course, Alan Garcia in Peru with their emphasis on the structural problems of their societies. In this direction, the Italian government’s debt cancellation, as well as creation of the Italian-Peruvian Fund, have played a vital role. Rocca analyses the migratory flows between the two countries, from famous Italian exponents in Peru such as the geographer, explorer and scientist, Antonio Raimondi, and, of course, Giuseppe Garibaldi, to the more anonymous, but no less significant, scores of Peruvian workers in Italy taking care of the sick, the young and the aged Italians. A certain assonance between the languages, the Catholic dominant culture and ready employability in the caring industry, has made the transition easier but, Rocca laments, there is still a great deal to be done. There are too few student bursaries for Peruvians and too many illegal, undocumented workers.

Silvia Neonato traces the history of Italian emigrants to Peru in her article, “Many left, some have returned”, which shows how - unlike emigration mainly from the impoverished South of Italy  to countries such as Argentina - Peru was the chosen destination for Italians from the northern region of Liguria. From the earliest arrivals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, exploiting the potential for trade of the mineral rich guano, by 1881 there were 9,000 Italians in Peru, 80 percent of which were from Liguria. Today the more than 6,000 Peruvians in Liguria still celebrate, for example, El Senor de los Milagros, with a procession in Chiavari, and in Rome involving thousands of aficionados, as well as Peru’s independence from Spain on July 28th. Genova’s International Centre of Italian Emigration (Cisei) and the Ligurian Archive of Popular Writing (Alsp) both house important collections regarding famous and less well-known migrants and travellers, underlining the important role the port town played in these transnational movements, as the issue of Leggendaria dedicated to Genova (n.61/2007) illustrated. The city also houses the Foundation Casa America, which organises conferences, lectures, exhibitions, book presentations, and which, in April 2006, became a temporary election station for the presidential elections where Peruvians resident abroad were able to cast their vote. Further support for strengthening relations with Peru comes from the Berio library in Genova, which organises an international poetry festival featuring Latin American readings, as well as poetry workshops run by Ernesto Torres. Rosaria Alvarez, who runs a non-profit association, complains that Italy is too slow to recognise academic qualifications and too bureaucratic in the way it processes applications for family members to join the main worker, usually a woman involved in the caring professions. Another young Peruvian, Antonio Martinez, presides over the Casa della Cultura Peruana, which organises cultural and religious events and exchanges.

In a similar vein, Silvia Rulli explores the links between Italy and Peru today, analysing data from the three Italian cities with the highest number of Peruvian residents: Rome, Turin and Milan. Citing influential figures in local communities, who have risen to the ranks of local counsellors, Rulli comments on the commonplace that Peruvian women are more in demand than their male counterparts for the jobs as nurses, old people watchers and babysitters that Italians are no longer willing to do and that are often underpaid. Peruvian women, she remarks, have almost all come from an original migration in their families from the fields to the cities. They are therefore better equipped to face the transition and are well used to working. Another way of looking at their experience is to consider it a journey of emancipation and independence. Two Peruvians in Italy, Rosario Josefina Caceres Siguas, and Juan Velasquez Quispe, contribute their experiences in two short articles where they describe the feeling of being in limbo as immigrants and deny the concept of a single Peruvian identity.

Fabio Claudio De Nardis (Italian ambassador in Lima) and Luigi Guarnieri’s articles should be read together as they show two different aspects of the intertwined histories of the two countries. In “The New World and Italy in the Mirror”, De Nardis explores the idea that history is usually written by the conquerors and risks being unilateral, but stresses that the discovery of a New World challenged many of the received ideas of the day. With the example of a “borderline” historian, as he calls him, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born of an Inca princess and a Spanish Officer, De Nardis shows that the dilemma of ‘which regions are to be considered at the antipodes’ was already relevant in the sixteenth century. Guarnieri, in his article on Italian emigration, traces the history of Italians in Peru, starting with the privileged relationship between the Republic of Genova and the Spanish Court, which gave greater leeway to Ligurians travelling to the colonies than other Europeans enjoyed. The Neapolitan Nicola Caracciolo became Viceroy of Peru at the beginning of the eighteenth century owing to the links between the Kingdom of Naples and the same Spanish crown centuries later. Painters, explorers, scientists and men of letters, as well as political exiles later found refuge in Peru, despite the hostility of the Spanish throne to enlightenment ideas. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Italy’s contribution was entrepreneurial, and industrial, with an important role in establishing a banking system in the country.

Maria Rosaria Stabili considers the question of whether reconciliation is ever really possible after over 20 years of atrocious human rights violations in Peru which ended only after the downfall of Fujimori and the notorious head of secret services Montesinos in 2000. Both the State and subversive groups such as Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru vented their violence on the portion of the population that was already disinherited – the campesinos, who were killed by the Army for harbouring terrorists and by terrorists for suspected collaboration with the Army. The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, established by the temporary president Paniagua in 2001 as a response to the amnesty called by Fujimori for any crime committed between 1980 and 2000, was confirmed by Toledo. The final report was published in 2003, establishing the staggering figure of 69,000 deaths or disappearances in the twenty years of State and terrorist violence. In the President of the Commission’s presentation speech, quoted in the article, Lerner Febres denounces not only the killings and torture, but also the indifference, ineptitude and indolence of those who could have done more to avert the scandal. The final conclusion is that the historical and social, economic and political discrimination against the native quechua speakers persists and that the most important role of the Report is to give the anonymous campesinos a voice. Stabili stresses bitterly, however, that the Report has not circulated widely and the voice of those who ‘don’t want to know’ is sadly much louder.

Ruth Shady Solis’s article opens our eyes to the ancient city of Caral, built by one of the most ancient civilisations in the history of mankind, the Caral-Supe, contemporaries of the Mesopotamians. Caral is the most extensive of the 20 or so cities identified along the 40 kms of the Supe valley, and shows a high degree of social organisation. Cotton production and fishing techniques were already advanced, and trading between the different settlements flourished. Solis stresses how important these discoveries are for the self-esteem of the country. The Caral-Supe archaeological project, funding research, conservation and valorisation of the country’s archaeological heritage, is an important contribution to local, sustainable development.

In the Literature section, Antonio Melis provides a detailed overview of Peruvian literature from the 1950s, when the first innovative novels and urban stories broke with tradition, to the present, including the often neglected Afro-Peruvian talents. In the 1950s, the novels of Julio Ramon Ribeyro and Enrique Congrains Martin paved the way for Mario Vargas Llosa, whose 1963,‘La ciudad y los perros’, made the Peruvian author world renowned. Despite his early experimentalism, however, his later works, Melis comments, were often marred by his excessively rigid conservative ideology. Jose Maria Arguedas described the transformations of the sierra with the advent of capitalism in his vast affresco, ‘Todas las Sangres’ and in his innovative ‘El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo’ with its blend of Spanish, Quechua and English, published in 1971 after his suicide. In the 1970s, Manuel Scorza remodelled the nativist tradition celebrating the epic struggles of campesinos in the Cerro de Pasco against the multinationals exploiting their land in a saga in five volumes. Alfredo Bryce Echenique, in a new form of the urban novel, concentrated on high society in Lima or Peruvians in Europe, using detached irony to veil his criticism  Edgardo Rivera Martinez and Miguel Gutierrez,with ‘Pais de Jauja’, and the three volume saga, ‘La violencia del tiempo’ respectively, were the most influential novelists in the 1990s. Afro-Peruvian authors from the same period include Gregorio Martinez and Antonio Galvez Ronceros, while a Peruvian transplanted to the United States, Eduardo Gonzalez Viana wrote about North American Society, and in a recent novel tackled the issue of Mexican immigration in the picaresque ‘El corridor de Dante’. Younger novelists were obviously more affected by the twenty years of political violence that shook the country. These include Alfredo Pita, Alonso Cueto and Jaime Bayly.  The Peruvian poets reviewed include members of the 1950s generation - Sologuren, Eilson, and Blanca Varela, who has become through the years one of the most influential Latin American poets with her 1986 collection, ‘ Canto villano’ and her more recent ‘El libro de barro’ (1993), ‘Concierto animal’ (1999) and ‘El falso teclado’ (2000). In the 1960s Delgado, Guevara, Hernandez, Calvo, Cisneros,and Hinostroza were the main exponents, while the 1970s saw the rise of Jose Watanabe and Varestegui, an exponent of the avant garde group Hora Zero, as well as of several women’s voices including Carmen Olle, and Rosina Valcarcel. Melis’s review concludes with an overview of playwrights, literary critics and, importantly, indigenous writing in Quechua and Aymara.

Sara Beatriz Guardia’s article on women’s literature has the subtitle: “Rebellious women who both call for and criticise silence”. From the flourishing literature of the convent in the colonial period, to the artistic fervour after independence from Spain in 1821, when the idea that women should receive an education began to take hold and literary clubs were frequented by women, it became clear that women had an important role to play in forging Peruvian literary identity. But the struggle, as always, was to find a voice and express their own version of the truth. In the twentieth century, autobiography, in particular of the wives of famous men, diaries and poetry were a vehicle for this truth. It was not until the 1990s, with the advent of feminism, that the novel became an acceptable form of communication for women writers. Mariela Sala, and Laura Riesco are the best known authors of this generation.

Lucia Charun-Illescas, herself a novelist in the Afro-Peruvian tradition, has contributed an article on the often neglected and still emarginated Afro-Peruvian culture and history, commenting wryly that ‘Afro-Peruvian’ may be the politically correct term but in Peru the word ‘negro’ is still collectively accepted. Since the days of slavery, when the earliest arrivals were in fact descendents of Africans born in Spain, and therefore spoke the language and had already assimilated Spanish culture, Afro-Peruvians have always occupied the lowest socio-economic position. After abolition, ‘pigmentocracy’, or ‘blanqueamento’ as Charun-Illescas calls it, was rife. Whitening up was the only way to get ahead socially and culturally. Today there are over two and a half million descendents, who, the Afro-Peruvian sociologist Jose Luciano says are emarginated together with ’90 percent of the population either because they are black or indios, because they are poor, from the mountains or from the jungle, because they are women, or because they speak quechua  Charun-Illescas makes a distinction in the literature between ‘negro’ literature, where the figure of the negro fits the dominant image of a sensuous, sexual savage with primitive instincts and little intelligence, and Afro-Peruvian literature, or Afro-realism, which provides  an inter-ethnic vision from within. Examples are Gregorio Martinez, Antonio Galvez Ronceros and don Nicomedes Santa Cruz Gamarra, whom Charun-Illesco considers the father of this movement. Her own novel, Malambo, a fantasy affresco of Lima during the slave trade and Spanish colonialism, she claims, was the novel she always wanted to have read. In an interview with Alessandta Ricci, she says, explaining why she lives in Berlin: ‘Where once Europe invaded Africa, now Africans invade Europe… I live where it is economically advantageous for me to live.’ She then quotes the nobel Wole Soyinka: ‘There is a certain poetic justice in this situation.

To close, the three BIBLIOMAPS cover the areas of fables and legends from native mythology (Giulia Dalla Negra); travel books and guide books for the Andes (Sara Bennet);  history books covering the Incas, Spanish colonialism, modern history up to Fujimori’s presidency, and the period of the ‘dirty war’ and Sendero Luminoso; and, finally, books on migration, women migrants, Italian emigration and transnational identities.


LEGGENDARIA 62/2007

“TO MAKE BOOKS, AN ACT OF LOVE”

abstracts

The main feature in issue n.62 “On Publishing” examines the process of producing books from various points of view - that of the publisher, the reader, the author, the editor, the bookseller – and concludes that for all of them bringing out books is an act of love.  As Simona Bonsignori points out in her introduction, books have an intrinsic value that is not reflected in the book-jacket price: <<the commitment in terms of time, intellect, attention and human relations cannot be measured>>. In Italy, moreover, as Marco Bascetta discusses, readers are few and far between, and alternative forms of information compete for their attention. And yet, he claims, cultural production in the form of books has not lost its “use value”; if anything, as ideas bounce from the Internet and new political movements, books are becoming ever more important.

Italy’s big publishers, like its industries, lie firmly in the hands of certain families, which also control distribution. There are, however, 880 small and medium sized publishers (SMPs represent 30% of total production) who are extremely dynamic, especially in finding new authors and introducing foreign talent. Bonsignori interviews several editorial directors examining twelve different issues: Why publish? For whom? What kind of reader is a publisher? How much does publishing cost and is it viable without public contributions? The Italian problem: how to create readers? Shared publishing ventures: is there a future? How important is the relationship with the author? The role of translation today: should there be common licences? Changing readerships: how to involve readers? Women readers are strong readers: how to capture male readers? The digital generation: how to shape young readers? Culture: the role of university presses, absent in Italy; and, finally, How to keep the accounts in order and still publish the books you believe in?

Anna Maria Crispino interviews some influential women publishers, who all agree that the publishing world is increasingly dominated by women, but who unanimously reject the idea of ‘niche’ markets. Maria Liguori, partner in the third-generation family firm, has contributed to the development of women’s studies in Italy by developing academic networks such as Verona’s philosophical group, Diotima, and the Naples Archive. Simona Marino founded the small publisher Filema with three partners in 1992 specialising in philosophy, while Cristina Lupoli Dalai founded and directs the collection ‘Le Mele’ dedicated to women’s writing, running the influential fiction collection ‘La Tartaruga’ at the same time. Roberta Mazzante at Giunti has just launched a new collection of international women’s fiction after the huge success of the ‘Astrea’ collection that published the biography of Rigoberta Manchu.

 An interview with Ginevra Bonpiani by Claudia Patuzzi goes on to talk about a new collection, ‘Nottetempo’, which aims to provide quality bedside-table books for readers who can’t sleep. Bruno Mari talks about the problems of distribution with Crispino, concluding that books need to be brought to the reader, in museums, in multimedia form - whatever it takes. This approach is confirmed by Bonsignore’s article on megastores, the bookshops of the future, complete with coffee shops, sofas and Internet access. This trend inevitably leads to the slow death of the independent bookshop, the articles confirm, and yet, conversely, these huge supermarkets lead to disorientation in readers, who seek a guide in the small bookseller. Further guidance is provided less these days by literary critics and newspaper book reviews, as Silvia Neonato points out, and more by word of mouth and some influential radio programmes, in particular, Italy’s Radio 3 ‘Fahrenheit’, whereas tv plays a minor role, with a few exceptions humorously listed by Sara Bennet.

At the 2006 Mantova Literature Festival Nadia Fusini and Liliana Rampello conversed about their individual and personal experiences of and approaches to Virginia Woolf - as women and as translators. Illustrating the dialogue are wood reproductions of the Woolf family homes inspired by Jean Moorcraft Wilsons’ book ‘Virginia Woolf, Life and London, a Biography of Place’. In the same Special on the writer who had so much influence on feminist writers, Lia Giachero presents Sybil Oldfield’s book of collected letters on the death of Virginia Woolf, recently published in Italian by Tartaruga Press.

In the ‘Margine’ section, Monica Luongo examines several new books by African writers, recently translated into Italian, on the occasion of Nadine Gordimer’s Lectio Magistralis at this year’s Grinzane Cavour Prize devoted to African Literature, commenting dryly on the tendency in the West to critique Africa from a non-African viewpoint.

Accompanied by powerful drawings by Marilina Ricciardi, the ‘Primo Piano’ reviews open with Nadia Tarantini’s investigation of a series of recent books dealing with haunting crimes or disappearances in which women have been the victims. Blending public and private stories, the inevitable conclusion is that without justice there is no hope for closure in the victims’ families. Luisa Tasca reviews a book by Patrizia Guernieri recounting the historically and sociologically fascinating story of a famous child murder trial that took place in late nineteenth century Italy, where Lombroso’s lasting influence battled with the fledgling science of psychiatry. Elena Laurenzi’s piece examines the feminist medievalist and philosopher Michela Pereira’s anthology of Alchemy Texts, while Francesca Pasini reviews Marisa Bulgheroni’s biographical novel set between the end of the second world war and today, using the original form of  flash-forwards rather than flash-backs. Marilena Lucente goes on to review a novel by Anna D’Elia that examines the personal issues of motherehood, illness and death through the collective horrors of war and torture: the Beslan massacre, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, kamikazes and their victims. Paola Splendore discusses Lidia Curti’s  recent book analysing women writers from a feminist and post-colonialial viewpoint adopting the leitmotifs of hybridism, the double, exile, the diaspora, East/West, among others. Stefania Lucamante investigates the unwieldy number of first-hand Holocaust witness accounts that are compiled and categorised by Mengaldi in twelve chapters that attempt to orient the reader and make the task of understanding more manageable. Finally, Cesira D’Agostino analyses the post-modern contaminations between poetry and the visual arts recently exhibited in Naples.

The ‘Incontro’ section presents a series of books published in Italy on the Plaza de Mayo mothers, while the ‘Letture’ section examines fiction by Chiara Ingrao, a concept album (with CD) by Sara Cerri, a biographical novel by Masa Gessen, poetry by Piera Mattei, an autobiography by Giulia Alberico, a new play by Marina Mizzau and Luigi Gozzi, Italian ‘chicklit’ literature by Claudia Priano, scientific popularisation by Franco Prattico on the mother of all Homo Sapiens, the Black Eve, the real-life story of an illegal domestic worker in Italy by Cetta Petrollo, an interview with the feminist politician and member of the Italian Communist Party, Giglia Tedesco, by Anna Maria Riviello and an overview of recent arrivals. The final page,‘Under-15’, is dedicated to children’s literature, , with a book by the Afro-Carribean writer, Maryse Condé, and another by the illustrator, Gabrielle Vincent, who was recently commerated at the Bologna children’s book fair.

LEGGENDARIA 61/2007
“Captains Courageous”
Women in Genoa and Liguria
ABSTRACTS

This monographic issue, edited by Silvia Neonato and Bia Sarasini, focuses on Genoa and Liguria. The sub-title “Captains Courageous” tries to capture the idea that women in this coastal area, whose destinies in the past were often linked to the sea, making them more autonomous than women in other regions of Italy, still have to struggle to be represented in politics and business.

In the introductory article, Silvia Neonato enquires whether women in politics are different to men. In Genoa and Liguria there are isolated examples of women in power, but they do not form a network, they are not part of a pressure group, there is not a women’s lobby. Two women today are candidates for important local political elections: Marta Vincenzi for Mayor of Genoa, and Renata Olivieri for President of the Province. On the election posters for Mayor, Vincenzi has cancelled the masculine singular indefinite article “il” before the noun “sindaco” (mayor) and replaced it with a feminine “la” to underline the difference. And yet, Neonato observes, while internationally women candidates such as Ségolène Royal and Hillary Clinton are the object of debate, in this Italian region women occupy important positions but fail to reach a critical mass. Should quota systems be imposed? Neonato asks. The successful managers and political activists she questions respond grudgingly that they don’t like the idea, but, yes, perhaps they are needed. “As long as”, Oliveri rebuts, “they do not become a tool for putting women down, as if we could not have arrived without men’s help. The problem lies in our society, not in us”, she concludes. In what way do women who hold power differ from men, then? Neonato insists. Cinzia Vigneri, head of human resources for the city council thinks the difference lies in team work, while Paola Toni, director of infant education services claims that organization counts, as well as sharing ideas and coming up with common projects. Valeria Maione, a professor of Statistics, on the other hand, admits that women often are unwilling, or unable, to do overtime and tend to be risk-averse by nature. Maria Paola Profumo, president of the Marine Museum MuMA believes that women first and foremost should realize that their contribution is innovative. “It is politics that should be feminized, not women who should become like men.”

In an interesting box entitled “Demographics” Silvia Neonato comments on the long tradition in Genoa of a low fertility rate, quoting from the sociologist Paolo Arvati’s work. Back in 1880, Italy had the fewest births of any Italian region. Early industrialization was a contributing factor, together with the fact that returning emigrants brought back their knowledge of contraception. Add to this the narrow terraced strips of mountainous land that did not allow peasants to feed many children, and the fact that the wives of sailors tended to be less prolific because their husbands were always away at sea. Today the trend is partially inversed owing to new immigration.

Two women city equal opportunity officers, Bianca Maria Berruti and Maria Dondero, discuss the recent proposal for a regional law supporting women and children who become victims of abuse in an article assessing the effects of the “gender balance” law which obliges the provincial budget to distribute resources more equally. Berruti claims that equal opportunites should not be a separate issue: “it is all part and parcel of democracy and social equity. Basically, if women are better off, society is better off”. The new regional law is an important milestone for both women, because it will be incorporated in the regional health plan, allowing for new structures to be built as well as training for people working with battered women and abused children in police stations and hospitals. Prevention is key, Dondero claims. A project that brings trained counselors to schools to help adolescents address issues such as bullying, eating disorders, dependencies, and sexual violence, and legal advisors to help prostitutes escape sexual slavery. Finally, a project to train women to become bus and truck drivers has been implemented, with the result that public transport is no longer the absolute domain of men.

Donatella Alfonso interviews Carla Gardino, president of Slam, a sailing and sportswear company favored by skippers on the America’s Cup to find that, in her view, Genoese women have to leave home and gain experience abroad if they want to have any chance of success in business and industry. “If I had stayed in my father’s business I would have been a secretary all my life”, she claims. “In this patriarchal, Catholic society, if you were lucky you got a dowry, and were married off, preferably to the son of another local entrepreneur, who would then become a part of the family-holding.” Gardino is convinced that the chance for women is now that the city has become a city of services rather than industry, but, she claims, we have to fight against our own stereotypes. “Even when we are the main wage earner, we don’t like to say so. We have to pretend our job is to take care of others.”

Using the metaphor of a burqa, Sondra Coggio and Silvia Neonato look into the fact that in La Spezia and province there are practically no women with positions of responsibility in politics. While the city is one of the oldest cities with left-leaning mayors, there are no women leaders. And yet, the percentage of women managers is the same as in the rest of the country (23%), and in careers where access is through public competitions women do very well. The answer is to publish the statistics so that men can no longer pretend local politics is only for them.

In an interview with the out-going Mayor, Giuseppe Pericu, Bia Sarasini asks what has changed in Genoa in the last ten years. “Genoa has started to believe in itself again” he answers. “The city has changed: small businesses are now the norm, and the tertiary sector presents an employment opportunity for women.  Then there’s immigration: the city is more creative now. In a city where men were traditionally away at sea, at war, or trading, women have always played an important role. I admit,” he admits quite frankly, “that when I have to find someone to fill a position I tend to think of a list of men. Perhaps its time you women started presenting yourselves.”

The candidate for Mayor who got 60% of the votes in the primaries is a woman called Marta Vincenzi, currently Euro MP in Brussels, with a role in the Transport Commission. Party diehards are not so keen: Vincenzi gets votes without needing quotas, and she’s ambitious: a mortal sin for a woman. But, as she says, “solidarity doesn’t come after a few decades of emancipation. The more women play a part in politics the more our ideas will circulate. I have no idea whether there’s a women’s way in politics; I would like to find out together with other women.” Vincenzi was a teacher, and school head, for years, and she doesn’t like using the fact that she’s a woman as an electoral ploy. “What counts are the facts. I think women should be able to be involved in any field, from steel works, ports, roads, transport to social services.”  She used to teach in a small Sardinian village, crossing the sea from Genoa on the ‘Bocaccio’, an old ferry that many years later, having been sold off as scrap, sunk with thousands of pilgrims on their way to the Mecca. Is it destiny that led her to Brussels where a recent proposal in the Transport Commission to forbid old ships being sold off cheap to the Third World bears her signature?

In a nostalgic piece, Alberto Leiss talks about his return to Genoa after years in Rome as a journalist for the newspaper l’Unità. His first return was to make a television documentary on the city. Remembering the atmosphere in the early 80s, Leiss says: “there was an unnerving expectation that something was about to happen.” Now, maybe it has, he says, evoking his mother who would stare out of her window as the Marine Museum was being built and worry that her view of the sea and the lighthouse would be changed irrevocably. He resents those journalists who lament that ‘there are no more shops, only Halal butchers’. They stay open later, he says, and his Senegalese neighbors have become friends. The city has turned the corner.

In an interview with Anna Giacobbe, the woman general secretary of the Ligurian trade union CGIL – the major of the three trade unions in the country -  Neonato quotes Giacobbe’s daughter, who apparently in a game said: “I’m a pirate, but I’m also a Mum”. Giacobbe, it seems, is a role model for reconciling work and home-life. “The CGIL”, she answers, “has finally realized that there are two sexes.” However, she then admits, “being a woman general secretary does not solve the problem of inequality or of women’s representation. I don’t believe we are necessarily better, but I have no doubt whatsoever that we must be represented because we represent half of the population.” Giacobbe warns against the dangers of quota systems: “If they put women in positions they are not competent to fill, there will be a boomerang effect.” While men are often inadequate, she admits, it shows less. “And anyway, they are the ones that set the rules.” Time, for example is an issue: “It takes time to establish oneself, and women have less time.” What can women teach and what can they learn from being in power? Well, first, that we shouldn’t pretend power is not important. Second, we don’t need to say sorry for existing. We can have doubts, and express them, but still maintain the capacity to make decisions.”

Bia Sarasini meets communications officer for Genoa, Anna Castellano, and asks her how women have contributed to the transformation of the city. Much of the new employment generated by the service industry, and in particular by the rise of tourism in this coastal area, is taken up by women. When Genoa was culture capital, and with the 2001 G8 summit, the city also received a fair amount of public funding, making it “ a city of art and culture, of research and technology. For us the knowledge economy has been transformational, and women have been its motor.” Inviting the Leisure editor for the New York Times to the city, Castellano was terrified she would find Genoa depressing, dirty and unattractive, but in the end the spirit of the city won the journalist over and the article was positive. Castellano hopes the new administration will establish an agency to coordinate the efforts to promote the city and attract new visitors.

Giulietta Ruggeri celebrates the opening of the new Women’s House on March 10, 2006 and describes the odyssey since the previous administration unexpectedly closed the newly opened centre in 1992 because it cost too much, causing a rift between women activists inside political parties and feminist associations outside. Finally, the conflict has been resolved, and the centre can begin to organize workshops, laboratories and seminars in culture and empowerment. Various working groups are already active: themes include the body, gender, time banks, environment, entrepreneurship, women and religion, immigrants and the vote.

Mercedes Bo runs Genoa’s AIED, a women’s reproductive and sexual health unit. In an interview with Bia Sarasini, she reveals that much of their work nowadays is pioneering work with immigrants, as in the old days it was with new arrivals from the South of Italy. In Genoa, immigrants are 52.8% women, one third of which are from Equador.  “In our experience,” Bo states, “women soon settle into their new lives, and learn the ways of the host country.” Their problems are always during the transition, when their lives have undergone an upheaval. Immigrant women soon realize how hard it is to have as many children as they had expected to have, and adjust accordingly.

Monica Lanfranco talks about the feminist three-monthly review Marea she contributed to founding in 1994. The title means ‘tide’, and the review came to life on the banks of Lake Garda, with the sub-title: ‘moorings, routes, harbors’. Taking key words as themes (sex, family, dreams/needs, peace, war, food, power) each issue presents the current debate. Once a year, a short story competition contributes to a literary number. Lanfranco laments the limited public funds available, attributing this in part to the stereotype of Genoese miserliness, and in part to the shortsightedness of local administrations. To find out more www.mareaonline.it

Women and theatre in Genoa: Pina Rando, president of an association called Archivolto, is uncertain whether she would recommend the theatre as a career for her daughter, but in her view women have certainly contributed to putting Genoa on the map, as Silvana Zanovello discovers. The icon of Genoese theatre is Mariangela Melato, currently involved in a one-woman-show called ‘Alone, I’m off’ where she sings and dances. Pina Rando has founded a festival, Mondomare, which for the fourth summer running is taking productions to four Ligurian provinces. Maria de Barbieri, with her Teatro della Tosse (Coughing Theatre) now a stable company, has broken the ice for women theatre managers, with Carla Pairolero and Valentina Arcuri hot on her heels with their Suq, a multi-ethnic theatrical workshop that has even been exported to other cities. Finally, we have women directors: Daniela Ardini, whose association has established a festival in the heart of Genoa, and Laura Sicignano, whose company called Cargo has transformed an abandoned warehouse to the far west of Genoa creating a new cultural frontier for the city.

Vanessa Beecroft created a visual arts performance at the Palazzo Ducale for the G8 summit (VB48) that will never be forgotten. Born in 1969 in Genoa, the artist now lives and works in New York. Her most recent performances were VB55 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and VB 58 in Miami. At the centre of her images, Francesca Pasini writes, is the “relationship between creation and the need to interact among an increasing number of identities, histories and traditions.” In the installation at Palazzo Ducale, VB “chooses to look at herself through the most acclaimed symbolic difference: the skin … thus stimulating onlookers to catch the eye of those who are different to us and take on the responsibility of our tradition.”

In a selection of books reviewed on feminist philosophy and epistemology, Pieranna Gervaso and Nicla Vassallo discuss the concepts of point of view and subjectivity. Quoting the classic Harstock, they trace the Marxist roots of the theory, and go on to present some of its offshoots. Is it necessary to be a woman in order to adopt a woman’s point of view? Should one point of view be epistemically privileged, and can all women have the same point view, or are we not all intrinsically and subjectively different? While the Marxist approach was dominated by systems of production, new feminist writers and thinkers contemplate the epistemological differences inherent in the reproductive role. Another selection of books reviewed takes as its springboard bioethics and the links between women’s liberation movements and animal liberation. The genoese Luisella Battaglia founded the Bioethics Institute (www.istitutobioetica.org) and strongly believes that, historically, the fact that women were assimilated to nature and to the animal world should not be rejected outright. While ‘humanist’ feminists considered this assimilation degrading – as sarcastic publications such as ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes’ (1792) underlined in their imitation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1791 ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ – Battaglia feels that new developments such as ‘surrogate motherhood’ has put an animalist twist to things. As she says: “feminism should be involved in the struggle for animal rights … with a more radical analysis of oppression that goes beyond the species, underlining analogies between racism, sexism and specism. All forms of oppression are interconnected.

In the ‘Special Unpublished’ section, several pieces of writing are presented. Carla Sanguinetti writes poetically about her city, Genoa, “city of a thousand tongues and a thousand races”, with its narrow, wind-swept streets smelling of “mould, fish and contraband.” In particular she evokes the traditional procession during the Easter Passion, where a body of Christ, with “gaping wounds like vaginas” is carried through the streets whose walls are lined with morning glory, “the same man-god every year, but different.” Just as the Indians at Benares take an effigy of Kali and sink her in the Ganges, so Genoans ecstatically carry their figures, a Madonna, a be-jeweled Caterina of Genoa, singing, dancing, weeping. Images of life and death and the unknowable illusion of both. Gianna Schelotto offers a glimpse of her childhood, with a poignant memory of an old woman, Maria Luigia, who would go around her neighborhood offering flowers and prayers, and look after the poor and needy. Schelotto claims Maria Luigia gave her a revolutionary insight into the power of women. In her day, children were not to speak unless spoken to, and men left ‘women’s business’ to women, but Maria Luigia was insistent that everybody, men, women and children, should receive her flowers and blessings. Her power to “upset the established order to things” was a source of pride, which stayed with Gianna for the rest of her life. In a blog, the writer Rossana Campo sacrilegiously combines a visit to the gynecologist after a bout of cystitis with literary discussions about the power of writers to move. For the doctor, fiddling inside her while she talks, and interspersing her remarks with comments about her patient’s sex life and good-natured advice about prevention, Philip Roth is the last writer to use his penis when he writes; all the others go limp after the preliminaries. Back home, as Rossana satisfies her terrible need to piss every five minutes, she reflects that a writer has to live dangerously, and a very long time, before you can really “bother” someone with your writing.  Rosa Matteucci, in her short story, ‘The Missionary Position’, ironically juxtaposes two strangers who meet in a gas station, decide to have sex, but, Santina insists, they should never succumb to the conventionality of the missionary position. As their casual relationship proceeds, however, boredom sets in. As a final act, in order to sever ties, sex in the car at the side of the motorway is consumed – with him on top – when a truck slams into them. The metaphorically named Santina (little Saint) is saved by the man who, until seconds before, was cruelly pumping her body against the gear stick, against her will, forcing her to accept the submission of the missionary position. Camilla Salvago Raggi writes about her fascination with family history. Letters, marriage and birth certificates, family trees become an obsession. Reconstructing the two branches of her family, with all the “faded ink, photos with figures as pale as ectoplasms, account books with every detail of family life annotated in beautiful calligraphy”, she decides that she will always be indebted to her family for this hidden heritage. The stories they left behind are a legacy of stories from another time, another world, that have enriched her life endlessly. Donatella Bisutti’s poem about the tragedy of the G8 Summit, when her city was ‘violated’ by the Black Bloc who provoked violence and caused the death of a young activist at the hands of the police, mixes memories of the old city on the sea, and recent events. The short story by Claudia Priano adopts the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother has refused to get out of bed for months with severe depression, and whose father got into trouble with the police and ran away with a Polish woman, never to return. As Anna has a day off from school, her aunt comes and sits with her mother, and, with her unprecedented freedom, Anna wanders through the streets of Genoa blending observations, memories, day dreams, quotes from literature at school and from friendly neighbors who try to encourage her to carry on studying, spiced by the cruel barbs of friends at school who tease her about where she lives: the washing machine of the title (Le Lavatrici) where the 1960s houses, hundreds of little concrete boxes, have round windows in front.

In the section called ‘Transformations’, the city of Genoa is the object of different points of view. In her piece recounting the tragic days of the G8 Summit, when, Amnesty writes, “the worst violations of democratic rights in a western country since the second world war took place”, Bia Sarasini presents a number of documentaries, films, research and books published since. This wealth of material, Sarasini says, answers Camilleri’s famous investigator Montalbano’s question when he asks: “Can we pretend nothing happened?”

Carla Scarsi publicizes the remarkable archive at the Fondazione Ansaldo, where photographs, interviews, papers, pay books and accounts are collected, giving an insight into the life and work of thousands of workers and entrepreneurs, many of whom are women. For more information www.fondazioneansaldo.it and www.cultureimpresa.it.

The writer Giuliano Galletta takes us on a walk through the ancient streets of Genoa, and recommends fried cod under the arches of the Ripa Maris as an insight into the real soul of the city. Talking about the layers of the city, from the medieval historic centre, to the modern raised spaghetti junctions to the post-modern tourist oriented sea front, Galletta leads us onto the architect Federica Alcozer’s article that follows on the urban interventions that have transformed the city. Alcozer divides these changes into two categories: architectural and social. The opening up of the waterfront, which in the past was hidden by the port, was one of the biggest changes, changing the perspective of the city. The Acquarium, with its 1,300,000 visitors a year, together with infrastructure freeing the historic centre of traffic, has re-qualified the city. Now the Expo area, and Renzo Piano’s further contribution, the ‘bubble’ (the architect is interviewed by Renzo Raffaelli), as well as the Marine Museum, the Centre of Contemporary Art, and the House of Music, have opened up wide areas that were previously out of bounds. The social transformation makes Genoa a multiethnic, cosmopolitan city, where in the last 50 years it had been closed in on itself. Historically, a city of sailors, navigators and merchants, now a city that welcomes North African workers, South American families, and offers for school lunch pasta, quinoa, couscous and rice. Marta Visentin’s article on the species that inhabit the sea of Genoa is a natural continuation of the theme. The Pelagos project launched to save those valiant and eternal seafarers: the whales.

The section ‘Narrations’ opens with an evocation by Laura Guglielmi of the Liguria coast as it must have appeared to the women travelers, writers and artists who flocked there in the past. Mary Shelley lost her husband there: Percy drowned off the coast between Lerici and Viareggio. But she was nonetheless smitten with the wild beauty of the place, as was Virginia Woolf, who came with her husband Leonard, in a sort of pilgrimage to the Shelleys. The couple stayed in the Hotel Miramare at San Terenzo, “a windy little city, with Mediterranean houses painted yellow and red that I don’t think have ever changed, sprayed by the waves.” Katherine Mansfield planned to winter at Ospedaletti in 1919, but was forced to move to the French side of the border owing to an Italian postal strike. Emma Orczy, author of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, lived in Lerici between 1927 and 1933, while Rosa Luxemburg defined her house in Levanto “my little nest that sits in the most enchanting position”.  Nor were the visitors only from the North of Europe: two famous French authors also sojourned there: Simone de Beauvoir in Trebiano, and Marguerite Duras in Bocca di Magra.

Maria Vittoria Vittori follows with a piece on Italian writers and artists in the area. These include Giovanni Giudici, Italo Calvino (from Rapallo, where a prize was instituted in 1985 by the city with the Carige bank for women writers, as the box shows), Anna Maria Ortese, Mario Soldati, Gina Lagorio, Nico Orengo, Francesca Duranti, Rossana Campo (featured in this issue), and Dino Campana – to name only the best known. Vittori suggests that perhaps the very fact that this part of the coast is a border, a frontier with another country, makes it fertile terrain for artists: The air is full of “contraband, adventure, wild nature, solitary creatures, intense aromas, and irreperable melancholy.” A book by Francesca Durante, a family saga embracing a century, called The Canary’s Last Journey, is particularly recommended.

In the last artice in ‘Narrations’, Laura Santini reviews Annamaria Fassio’s work. Published mainly by Mondadori, Fassio is best known as a writer of spy stories and thrillers, which come out at the rhythm of nearly once a year. However, a new approach, that melds noir with psychological reconstructions, as led her to publish ‘Like a Torrent of Rain’ with a small Genoese publisher, Frilli. In this book, Fassio explores the world of the Red Brigade terrorists who were active in Genoa in the 1970s, and in particular the anonymous life of Antonia, by means of a narrative voice interspersed with an interior dialogue in italics with her sister. At the end of each chapter these two levels of narration are interwoven with a third: the voice of a magistrate trying to reconstruct the complex chain of events.

A big house in Bordighera, with a beautiful garden, once belonged to an influential figure in the world of fashion: Irene Brin, who was once a muse of Salvador Dalì when she ran a gallery in Rome. In fact, Irene Brin was a pseudonym adopted by the publisher Leo Longanesi to add a touch of class to her pieces, and ultimately give her an identity that was different from her own. Later, as Rome editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Claudia Claudiano writes, Irene Brin wrote fashion articles for over 20 years (1920-1940), which touched on manners, bon ton and society, providing a biting social commentary as well as answering readers’ letters. Her father was from Bordighera, and later in her life, she went there to die.

The section ‘Visions’ opens with the theme of famous gardens, and reviews several books taking as their theme the links between women and gardens. Villa Durazzo Pallavicini, with its recently restored botanical garden created by the Marchesa Clelia a Pegli, is a case in point. The particularly fertile and temperate conditions of the Ligurian coast made this area mythical in pre-Christian days, where the cult of Dea flourished until male-dominated monotheistic religions took root.  Clelia’s botanical garden features plants selected for their beauty as well as for their medicinal or therapeutic qualities. With so many famous gardens, it is no surprise that Genova hosted the first university course in landscape architecture, thanks to the untiring efforts of Annalisa Maniglio Calcagno. The faculty now offers Italy’s first ever course in Ecotherapy, or social and therapeutic horticulture. Milena Arnaldi has put theory into action, bringing fairy stories to life in the enchanted atmosphere of a property she and her husband are restoring to create a residential creative workshop for children. The old stone house stands in the shade of a huge beech tree, and all the decorations recall folk tales or the mythology of the woods: gnomes and elves and fairy tale figures. Adult accompaniers can do courses in medicinal and aromatic herbs, jam and candle making.

The medieval town of Varese Ligure, famous for its summer opera festival, Pietro Tarallo writes, has become a model of eco-compatibility. It is the first Italian town to receive the certificate Iso-14001 for organic farming and renewable energy, in particular harnessing the wind, which is a natural part of any Ligurian landscape.  Meat and cheese is all untreated, pesticides and OGM have been banned from the fields, and the livestock is fed with rigorously organic fodder. Citizens of the town are more than satisfied with this recognition of their efforts. Quality of life has improved, and, they boast, it is 100% sustainable.

Antonella Viale provocatively asks whether the San Remo Song Festival is cultivated and maintained in particular by women: housewives and dreamers who melt at the sound of soft pop produced by the music industry to suit their tastes. The daughter of two of Genova’s most famous singers, who have themselves sung at San Remo – almost against their principles – Fabrizio De André and Dori Ghezzi, has decided, after years of resisting the call of family tradition, to perform in public. She had already sung on stage as a background vocalist for her father’s last tour before dying of cancer, and her brother Christian, has already achieved a certain reputation, partly due to his startling similarity to his much mourned father, but for Luvi De Andrè this is a big breakthrough, Sandra Monetti writes. “I wasted years,” Luvi admits, “but I had to wait until I understood what I really wanted … I know it’ll take time to find my own identity, I have to prove I’m worth something on my own. But the best thing is being free to express myself without making any compromises.”

The final double page of the Visions section is devoted to poetry by Genovese artists and songwriters, among which we find Fabrizio De André, Luvi’s father. His perhaps most famous song, ‘Via del Campo’, expresses De André’s powerful philosophy in defense of the underclass expressed in the last two lines: “flowers grow out of manure, but nothing grows out of diamonds.” Others include Edoardo Sanguineti, Giorgio Caproni, Ivano Fossati, and Paolo Conte.

LEGGENDARIA 60/2007 – “MEMORIES”
Abstracts

This issue of Leggendaria focuses on Memory - private, public, intimate or collective. Its aim is not to evoke nostalgia, but to re-interpret the past in order better to understand the present.

Anna Maria Crispino reviews two books, two volumes of the journal Genesis, and three documentaries on Italian women’s history in the seventies published recently, quoting the historian D’Agostino: “in order to assimilate history, it needs to be shared in public”. The debate among historians, and especially among the women historians who published the two volumes of Genesis, is open: what is the best way to arrive at a shared history? They conclude that a common history emerges through personal narratives and sources that re-interpret history, as Mario Del Treppo in his The Freedom of Memory, and Hayden White in his Forms of History: From Reality to Narration confirm. The documentaries reviewed, with their meld of archive film, cuts from television and cinema classics, live interviews and powerful musical backdrops, contribute to this continuous re-interpretation of fragments of real life that is the history of the women’s movement in the making: the struggle for equal opportunities, the difficulties inherent in emancipation, generational conflict, the relationship of women to the greater history outside.

Cristiana Pipitone examines the role of women inside the trade union movement in Italy to mark the centenary celebrations of the CGIL in a collection of 300 archive photographs: Women in the CGIL: a History a Century Long. Arranged chronologically and thematically, essays accompany the images but the photographs construct a historical narrative in their own right. While other historical sources make women invisible, Lucia Motti points out in her Introduction, photographs give women a face and a body, and a significant role in the struggle for worker’s rights – even under Fascism – and later for family, citizenship, welfare, pension and reproductive rights.

A moving interview with Marigia Maulucci, now in the national CGIL office after thirty years of service in the trade union, reveals a dynamic power-house of a woman who is at the same time able to talk intimately about her difficult life choices and the death of her only son who was always “sunny, ironic and happy” thanks to the quality time she was able to give him. After teaching, Maulucci joined the CGIL in 1976 and quickly rose through its ranks, working in various departments and dealing with contracts, budgets, tax reform, prices and tariffs. In her view, after all these years, the greatest injustice in the world is still the gap between rich and poor, and the insecurity of the labour market which robs young people of the sort of ‘faith’ and ‘passion’ she has always had in political parties and ideologies.

A collection of unpublished writing by 39 women writers is another contribution marking the CGIL centenary. Reviewed by Nadia Tarantini, the volume Nate a lavorare (Born to Work), edited by Maria Jatosti and Rosetta Berardi, explores the world of work – in the widest sense - through women’s eyes, interwoven with the consideration that the act of writing itself is a form of labour and contributes to providing an original point of view on personal experience. The various acrobatics involved in being a workingwoman - juggling the domestic sphere against collective and social action - provide a kaleidoscopic picture of women’s life, from the surreal to the tangible. With the ultimate aim, perhaps, of allowing knowledge and experience to be transmitted to the generations that follow.

Sara Bennet explores eighteenth and nineteenth century diaries and family chronicles as a means of evidencing the inner folds of history. The book she reviews, edited by Bianca Tarozzi, called Giornate particolari (Special Days: Diaries, Memoirs and Chronicles) observes that diaries – as “memory writing” - were written with many different aims in mind. While writers’ memoirs were often self-consciously ‘public’ – Virginia Woolf, R.L.Stevenson, Franz Kafka and Margaret Fuller are included in the survey – others provide an intimate view of ordinary and extraordinary lives. In the case of Margaret Fuller, a travel diary becomes a meditation on frontier life, proving her conviction that “every oppressed group needs self-definition and self-representation.”

A collection of ‘non-fiction narratives’ on being Italo-American forms the backdrop for Anna Maria Crispino’s observations on the complex issue of hyphenated identities. In the book Our Roots are Deep with Passion, edited by Lee Gutkind and Joanna Clapps Herman, Italo-Americans – in the tradition of many other minority groups in the US – explore their roots and shared memories. With migration as a common denominator, and yet with the variety that is inherent in the fact that individual experience is the starting point for each piece in the anthology, the writing calls on a reconstruction of identity that provides answers to the basic questions: “Who am I? and Where do I come from?”. Seen from the perspective of second and third generation Italo-Americans describing the distant world of their grandparents, as well as from more recent arrivals who embrace their ‘Italian-ness’ more openly, what is striking about the anthology is both the quality of the writing and the commonality of identity. Crispino comments on the fact that enrolments in university Italian language and culture courses have increased by 30% since 1998, showing, as Selgin’s contribution points out, that identity today is “an amalgam of where we are from, who we are, or, perhaps, most importantly, what we choose or refuse to become.”

Sandra Petrignani talks about Claudia Patuzzi’s latest book, La stanza di Garibaldi (Garibaldi’s Room), in an article taken from her presentation of the book at the International Women’s House in Rome. The book, she says, has a touch of the Simenon, in the sense that a family secret, a deep pocket of pain, is hinted at and slowly revealed, creating layers of memory evoked through letters, family lore, exile.

Daniela Daniele presents Ellen Willis’s Three elegies for Susan Sontag, on Art, Politics and Death, published in Italian in this issue, with a short biographical piece on the influential feminist journalist who died on November 9, 2006. Willis’s highly personal approach and writing style, in the tone of ‘cultural conversations’, Daniele claims, lent authority to her radical criticism of contemporary society, and in particular against the cultural conformism of liberals in the US. The cynicism and neo-puritan tendencies of the politically frustrated left, she felt, had created a new kind of “moderate authoritarianism” that, Daniele points out, “cancelled pacifism and sexual liberation from their agenda”, and betrayed the core values of a generation’s struggles.

Caterina Venturini describes her experience on a residential course held at Villa Fiorelli in Prato on “Figuration (Figure/Action): Gender, Bodies” where several laboratories and group discussions took place.  One aspect that particularly impressed her was the transformation of objects or common concepts into metaphors: a garden becomes a recreated cosmos, a journey becomes a quest, a city becomes a meeting place between a static point in time and a throng of different desires. A place can also be figurative, Venturini points out. An example is the Caribbean that becomes a topos for a complex multiplicity of dissonant populations and languages. The discussion groups, however, did not escape from reality: they included topics such as sexual slavery, prostitution and infibulations.

The second edition of the Turin Festival of Spirituality is the topic of Bia Sarasini’s article, ‘In pursuit of utopia, hope and change’. There is a real thirst for knowledge and alternative forms of networking today, Sarasini observes, and increasingly, as the role of television, political parties and the church becomes less significant, people seek new ways to practise inner spirituality. The Turin festival, run by Antonella Parigi, Sarasini concludes, avoids sliding into facile New Age modishness and confirms its secular vocation. There were some important guests at the Festival: James Hillman opened a debate entitled ‘Dreams and Reality’, while Vandana Shiva talked about the life giving forces of water and land and the dangers they are currently facing in her country, India. Another moving discussion revolved around the figure of Alexander Boraine, co-president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, entitled ‘Healing from Hate’.

In the Special article of the issue, Chiara Ingrao translates and presents photographs and writing by Carol Hughes in a piece called ‘My Body Creaked’. The Canadian art historian, who has lived most of her life in the UK, specialized in Chinese Art and cultivated the art of massage for newborn babies as a passion. Once her six children had flown the nest, she went on a trip to Brazil to learn new techniques for baby massage, and the holiday ended up being a journey of self-discovery. One of her discoveries was writing, and the text that accompanies the extraordinarily expressive black and white birth pictures featured here became Mask of Lace, a long poem-prose story about a 50-year-old woman, and a story of her life. After a life of political activism - at Greenham Common at the Women’s Peace Camp, with Palestinian and Israeli peaceniks in 1989-90, with refugees in France - at the age of 60 Carol Hughes started to paint and draw with charcoal. The text presented here concludes that the best position for giving birth is that adopted by the native Indians, squatting nude and moving about as they wanted.

Grazia Livi’s novel, Lo sposo impaziente (The Impatient Husband), traces the imaginary relationship of Lev Tolstoy and his fiancée Sofia Bers. Their journey of discovery is allegorized in the honeymoon trip, and the emotional climax of the novel, which blends descriptive realism with visionary, dream-like sequences, is the wedding night in which the impatient groom of the title forces himself on Sofia and thus destroys her entire repertoire of amorous fantasies. A dark atmosphere of ineluctability is created as Livi draws together biographic elements, letters and narrative invention to re-create the Russian ambiance, landscapes and interiors perfectly.

Gramsci said once that whenever the question of language comes up it usually hides a host of other problems. In this book of collected essays on language edited by Vita Cosentino (Lingua bene commune), as Paola Bono  (says in her Introduction, there is a common theme: the pleasure of teaching language, and its expressive and disruptive power in the classroom. The essays from Italian, Israeli, French, German and Swiss contributors are divided into four sections: the performative function of language; the physiological (its relationship to the body and the mother tongue) and pathological (speech impediments) roles of language; the affective dimension of language (its therapeutic role); and finally the freedom of individual expression, and the rejection of political classification inherent in certain words. One thing all the contributors agree on, with Virginia Woolf is: when words are nailed down to one meaning only, they “fold their wings and die”.

Stefania Calzolari looks at a new study of the early twentieth century enigmatic figure - essayist, writer and poet - Cristina Campo. This volume (Appassionate distanze) edited by Monica Farnetti, Filippo Secchieri and Roberto Taioli, presents six previously unpublished pieces, translations and letters, including a reproduction of the original, handwritten version of Crux monastica. Campo’s relationship with Father Giovanni Vannucci is documented in Taioli’s essay on Campo’s aesthetics and her attitude to the sacred. Her views of human enterprise, suffering and pain have some affinities with Simone Weil, as Monica Farnetti shows in her essay. In another amusing contribution, Maria Pertile imagines a literary friendship between Campo and Marguerite Yourcenar, based on their ‘sister-like’ interest in Greek mythology, the oriental world, the family, dreams and journeys. Campo’s vast erudition is revealed in the index of names from Gli imperdonabili (The Unpardonable), edited by Paola Margarito, ranging from the Troubadours to the founding fathers of Oriental and Arabic culture, from the Upanishads to the mystic authors of the western tradition.

In a review of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, La figlia oscura (The Dark Daughter), Stefania Lucamante opens with the observation made by the narrative voice at the beginning of the novel that “the most difficult things to talk about are the things we ourselves fail to understand.” Written in a fictionally therapeutic style, the narrator confesses to something that she herself cannot explain: she, as a fully grown adult, stole a doll from a little girl on the beach because she was jealous of her relationship with her mother. In a hammering but dry style, without irony because she chooses to adopt a tragic tone, Ferrante presents a perfect portrait of a woman’s state of mind, her vulnerability, her fragmentation, and the inexorable transition from unhappiness to a permanent condition of suffering.

With a brief interview of Somaly Man while she was in Italy to talk about sexual slavery and present her book, Il silenzio dell’innocenza (The Silence of Innocence), Maria Vittoria Vittori asks the thirty-five-year-old Somaly – sold into slavery at the age of twelve – how her association (AFESIP) is surviving. The sad answer is that there is no funding, and workers have received no salary for three months, but one positive side is that the mentality in Cambodia whereby “a woman is an object to buy and sell” is beginning to change and a new law has been approved against domestic violence. For Somaly, a top priority is education for women: with no access to education or to property, girls will continue to be sold for sex.

Monica Luongo examines a new book edited by the historians Bertilotti, Galasso, Gissi and Lagorio called Altri femminismi (Other Feminisms: Bodies, Culture, Work). The issues debated provide a full range of new ‘border-line’ subjects. These range from the generational gap and the lack of communication between early feminists and what is perceived as the rigidity of younger women, the new relationship with other cultures, approaches and religions – transgenderism, the veil, genital modification – and the new challenges linked to migration, with the collective transformations that inevitably follow.

The section ‘Readings’ (Letture) presents several new books of photographs, novels and poetry. Angelo Ferrari’s book of exquisite photographs and stories, Sogni (Dreams), will finance a children’s hostel in Rwanda and give them hope for a future. Silvia Calamati has edited a book on the tragedy of Northern Ireland, with a vast bibliography, painstaking research into archives listing dates, names and events in the tragic history of the country, as well as a photographic appendix that makes your hair stand on end. Giuliana Morandini’s novel Una notte a Samarcanda (A Night in Samarcanda) abandons her usual setting in Mittle Europa for a journey into the heart of Islam. A trip across the desert that represents the extreme experience of the human condition, where “we all swallow the same dust, and buckle under the same wind” leads her to fall off her horse. After this mundane accident, with the forced immobility of her body, her mind is free to travel. Concita De Gregorio has written what Claudia Patuzzi calls a ‘non-book’: Una madre lo sa  (Mothers knows it better), twenty-two pieces that blend articles, essays, stories, fairy tales, interviews, and voice-overs of a narrative ego. The author, mother of four children, devotes a great deal of space to the normal and everyday, made up of things, bodies, pain, words, love, truth. As De Gregorio puts it: “a cross-roads of stories that I have never looked for … because life, luckily, finds a place for everything.” Maschilità decadenti (Decadent Masculinity) is the novel theme of the essays deriving from a 2003 conference edited by Marco Pustianaz and Luisa Villa. The focus of the conference was the de-masculisation of the male, from an anthropological, sociological, political and historical point of view. As men are re-defined, the authors hope, with Simone De Beauvoir, that in the future “you are not born a man, but become one”. In Rosa Matteucci’s third novel Cuore di mamma (Mom’s heart) she deals with a familiar situation and gives it a grotesque twist: the last few months of her seriously ill mother and finally her death. Gabriella Gianfelice’s new collection of poems La Notte Innocente celebrate life with a certain affinity for the great feminist poet Sibilla Aleramo, whose Hymns to Life declare a deep love for nature and the world around her. In this collection, night becomes a moment of re-birth, and life is always true to itself: her images are images of the earth, seeds that disclose new life, the wind that transports them. Lia Levi’s latest novel L’amore mio non può opens with the heart-stopping: “My husband committed suicide one summer’s day in 1939, ten months after losing his job because of his ‘race’.” A first person account reveals the fragility and strength of a young woman, against the backdrop of greater history. Charlotte Salomon entrusted the 1,325 pages of her life’s work to her friend, Dr Morodis, before being deported, pregnant, to Auschwitz where she was gassed on October 10, 1943. The gouache paintings, musical annotations and writings are now collected in a new edition published for the Day of Memory, together with a biographical section and another section that compares her experience with that of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish philosopher who died at Auschwitz two months after Salamon . For Salamon, born into the refined Jewish culture of 1920s Berlin, painting was a way to channel her anxiety and her fear of the emptiness and annihilation that was going on around her. Antonietta Pastorale’s new collection of poetry Verso nuove identità (Towards New Identities) uses the concept of time to talk about women in history and mythology: Penelope, Dido, Euridice, Cassandra. Michela Volante has written a novel – Uno a testa (One to each one) - that uses the paradigm of fanta-politics, or even fanta-sociology, to explore contemporary issues. The idea is shocking: a futuristic society allows each citizen to take one pistol shot at one person – anyone they choose. The result is that the public sphere invades the private sphere and the norms of society are irrevocably disturbed. As each person can also become a target, hypocrisy takes over from cordial relations, and a gradual desertification paralyses human relations.