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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Alessandra Lavagnino

Alessandra_Lavagnino Mario Tschinke WikiCOmmons CCO 1.0.jpg
Alessandra Lavagnino (Photo: Mario Tschinke via Wikimedia Commons CCO 1.0)

Alessandra Lavagnino was born in Naples in 1927 and died in 2018. She grew up in Rome where she graduated in Biology. Her postgraduate research was partly carried out in Palermo, where she continued to live, teaching at the University, working on the campaign to eradicate malaria, and becoming Associate Professor of Parasitology. She was married with two children and two grandchildren. Some of her most important writing appeared in the years following her retirement from academic life.

Lavagnino’s earliest literary publications were stories in magazines such as Amica and Nuova Antologia. Her first novella, I lucertoloni, appeared in 1969 after being awarded the Premio Inedito for its unpublished manuscript, and was later translated into English by William Weaver. Una granita di caffè con panna (1974) may be the first account from a woman’s point of view of life in a society dominated by the Mafia. Leonardo Sciascia praised this novella for both exemplifying and bringing to a close the Pirandellian tradition of truth revealed in madness. The book was originally serialised in Amica magazine as La verità e le mosche, and this was the title chosen for its publication in English as Truth and Flies in 2010.

In fiction and non-fiction, Lavagnino’s favoured vehicle is the short novel or long story, and her most distinctive literary preoccupation is silence. She lyrically dramatises the act of not saying in all its wide variety – from a teenager’s debilitating stammer to the divine decree imposed on John the Baptist’s father, metaphors of the silences which continue to haunt Italian society.

Lavagnino’s non-fiction includes three works dealing with insects and their impact on human beings, told in a form she called 'divulgazione raccontata’ [narrated popularisation], an informal narrative method drawn from her approach to teaching.

Her one full-length novel, Le bibliotecarie di Alessandria (2002), was short-listed for the Premio Strega and the Premio Vittorini, and won New York University’s Zerilli-Marimò Award.

In her later years Lavagnino played a central role in a wider cultural project to record a forgotten part of Italian history. During the Nazi occupation a team of civil servants defied the authorities in order to rescue artworks from the dangers of the Allied invasion and bring them to safety in the Vatican. This operation is commemorated in Un inverno 1943-1944 (2006), which draws on accounts left by those who took part in it. Lavagnino herself appears in Paolo Pisanelli’s film, Un inverno di guerra (BigSur, 2009), which is based on her book.

Her work has been translated into English and other foreign languages.

Compiled by Adam Elgar