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

Fabrizia Ramondino

Fabrizia_Ramondino 1987 (Augusto Da Luca WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Fabrizia Ramondino, 1987 (Photo: Augusto Da Luca via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Fabrizia Ramondino (1936–2008) is one of the most significant Italian writers of the second half of the 20th century. Born in Naples, she spent the first eight years of her life in Majorca, where her father was Italian Consul. The family returned to Naples in 1944 but moved again in 1948 to follow the father to France, going back to Naples in 1950 after he suddenly died. At the age of 18, she went to Germany: the period she spent there between 1954 and 1956, intended to be her initiation into adulthood, laid the foundations for a life-long connection with Germany and German culture. She then lived in Milan and Rome between 1957 and 1960, when she returned once again to Naples, this time to remain there for over 20 years, except for short trips, prompted by her personal and political interests, to Portugal, China, Australia, and Western Sahara, among other countries, and for frequent visits to Germany, where her daughter went to study dance and subsequently settled. In Naples, Ramondino became involved in socio-political activism, obtained a degree in languages from the Istituto Universitario Orientale, and started to write. She taught French in state schools from 1966, the year in which her daughter was born, to 1984. Following the 1980 earthquake, which destroyed her home in the Neapolitan neighbourhood of Tribunali, she moved to Itri, a town north of Naples in the Lazio region but Neapolitan in culture. From Itri she kept in close contact with Neapolitan life, writing for various newspapers, especially Il Mattino, during the 1980s. She died on the nearby beach of Gaeta, where she swam every afternoon, on 23 June 2008, the day before the publication of her novel La Via.

Ramondino famously declared that ‘non sto […] a Napoli sicura di casa ― né d'altra parte in altri paesi e città’ [I do not […] feel safe at home in Naples ― and neither do I in other countries and cities] (Star di casa, 1991, p. 8) and that Naples was her ‘patria elettiva dello spirito’ [elective spiritual motherland] (Taccuino Tedesco, 1987, p. 5; 2010, p. 13), highlighting her deep affinity with Naples and at the same time her ‘disagio della stabilità’ [unease with stability].

Like her life, Ramondino’s writing moves in and out of Naples. The numerous places where she lived equipped her with many languages which gave her access to different cultures and literatures. As a child she spoke Spanish, Catalan, and Italian. She then learned the Neapolitan dialect, French, and German. Her playful remark that in Neapolitan dialect the word ‘j’ means both ‘io’ [I] and ‘andarsene’ [to leave], and that, as a consequence, ‘in quel dialetto insomma io se ne poteva andare’ [in that dialect, in brief, ‘I’ could leave] (In viaggio, 1995, p. 22) conveys the essence of her literary project of narrating Naples and a subjectivity which constitutes itself through language and space, originating in Naples yet exceeding it, through an endless movement in and out of the place of origin that enables her protagonists and alter egos in turn to construct, undo, and redraw the boundaries around Naples and the Self in the encounter with the other.

Ramondino came late to writing. Her first novel, Althénopis, appeared in 1981, after an intense period of political militancy in Naples which gave her literary work a highly ethical and political quality. During the 1960s and 1970s, she became involved in a number of social, political, and pedagogical projects, such as the Associazione Risveglio Napoli, a lay association which offered free classes for children and adults from the lower classes, and Centro di Coordinamento Campano, a small organisation of the new left which worked primarily with factory workers, agricultural labourers, and the urban unemployed. The latter experience was recorded in her first publication, a book of testimonies of the Neapolitan organized unemployed: Napoli. I disoccupati organizzati. I protagonisti raccontano (1977).

Her love of literature and writing went back to adolescence (see Storie di patio, 1983; Mastrodomenico, 2012). During the years of her political activism, when the essay genre had primacy among activists and intellectuals, Ramondino had been writing in secret. She described the book she was writing as ‘una sorta di romanzo’ [a novel of sorts] to fellow activist and intellectual Goffredo Fofi (2021, p. 65). The publication of Althénopis by Einaudi took everybody by surprise, yet the novel mesmerized her friends, readers, and critics, including Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, with the novelty and force of her narrative style and the intensity of her representation of childhood and Neapolitan and Southern life. It has been suggested that the temporary fracture between political commitment and literature that Ramondino experienced at the time helped her to develop her distinctive style: a writing that crossed different genres, into which she was able to channel her life, Naples, and the world (Liguori, 2021, p. 92). Il libro dei sogni (2002), the analysis of a selection of dreams she had between 1964 and 1969, during her marriage crisis, has been read as the story of her difficult coming to writing (Alfonzetti, 2012). Althénopis was followed by a varied corpus of works that place themselves on the boundaries between novel, autobiography, memoir, meditation, confession, travel writing, anthropological and linguistic reflection, and more. This highly personal style of writing was put to the service of a literary interrogation of identity and its foundations in language, family, class, geography, and history, making Ramondino a keen observer of the transformations of Italy in the second half of the 20th century, and their connections with and reverberations in Europe and the globalized world.

Un giorno e mezzo (1988), Ramondino’s closest work to the novel genre, is set in 1969 Naples: it is a story of the political passions of those years that also reproduces with great precision the texture of the private life behind the public commitments and the outer façade of her characters. In the collections of short stories, Storie di patio (1983), Il calore (2004), and Arcangelo (2005), and the novel Guerra di infanzia e di Spagna (2001), she returns to her childhood in Spain and in rural areas of Campania, set against the background of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. With In viaggio (1995) and L’isola riflessa (1998), her writing becomes increasingly more fragmented and self-referential, signifying, in the former, the narrator’s privileged condition as a nomad between places, languages, and texts, and in the latter, the shattering of the narrator’s self as a consequence of depression and alcoholism, her inner malaise and attempts at self-annihilation and her struggle to recompose the self through a renewed relationship with nature, place, and history, through ‘condivisione’ [exchange, inclusion] with the other, and through writing. Thus, Ramondino’s protagonists and the author herself, despite being always ill at ease in the world and often living on the edge of the abyss, are always projected towards the attainment of a sense of belonging and (the impossible) Utopia. Mario Martone, with whom Ramondino wrote the screenplay for his film Morte di un matematico napoletano (1992), has aptly described her as somebody with ‘una visione spietata di cosa significa nascere e stare al mondo’ [an unmerciful view of what it means to be born and to live in this world] and yet able to ‘alimentare l’illusione attraverso una vitalità estrema, dando continuamente senso allo stare al mondo’ [keep the illusion alive by means of an extreme vitality, thus giving meaning to being in this world] (2021, p. 69).

Ramondino continued her political commitment by collaborating in projects with marginal and oppressed groups, such as the women who voluntarily attended the Centro Donna di Salute Mentale in Trieste and the Sahrawi people, whose fight for independence she supported throughout her life (Cacciapuoti, 2021). These experiences were recorded respectively in Passaggio a Trieste (2000) and Polisario. Un’astronave dimenticata nel deserto (1997), her logbook for the month-long expedition of Martone’s film crew among the Sahrawi people in the Algerian desert.

Ramondino has also left a volume of poetry, Per un sentiero chiaro (2004), and a play, Terremoto con madre e figlia (1994), written in the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake and staged by Martone in 1993. Other plays have recently come to light in Ramondino’s archive: Villino bifamiliare was staged in Naples in Spring 2022, directed by Arturo Cirillo, and is now in print. New editions of Guerra di infanzia (2022) and Althenopsis (2023) have appeared with the Roman publisher Fazi, with prefaces by prominent writers Nadia Terranova and Chiara Valerio respectively.

Critical studies on Ramondino continue to appear. She was hailed as one of the heirs of Elsa Morante and critics have started to examine the links between them (Alfonzetti, 2002, 2012; Giorgio, 2013; Lucamante, 2006) as well as the links with Anna Maria Ortese (Lanslots, 2013; Sanna, 2018), two writers Ramondino knew personally. It is now time to start assessing Ramondino’s own legacy and influence. Her most successful novel, Althénopis, has been translated into English, French, German, and Spanish, and most of her works have appeared in German. It is to be hoped that ever-growing critical appreciation will encourage the publication of translations of more of her works, especially in the English-speaking world.

Ramondino was awarded a number of literary prizes: Premio Napoli 1981 and Premio Lombardi-Satriani 1984 for Althénopis; Premio Settembrini (Mestre) 1995 for In viaggio; and Premio Elsa Morante Isola di Procida 1998, Premio Grinzane-Cavour 1999, and Premio Leonardo Sciascia–Grotte 1999 for L’isola riflessa.

Compiled by Adalgisa Giorgio (Bath)