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

Goliarda Sapienza

Epigrafe_Via_Pistone,_20_Catania_(Goliarda_Sapienza)_300x270.jpg
Plaque in Via Pistone 20, Catania, where G. Sapienza was born, donated by Società italiana delle letterate. (Wikimedia Commons)

Goliarda Sapienza’s writing includes short stories, novels, and poetry. Failing to garner widespread appreciation during her lifetime, many of her literary works, as well as her personal diaries and letters, have been published posthumously. 

She was born in Catania in 1924. Her mother was Maria Giudice, a well-known socialist, journalist, and antifascist, who had spent several years rallying rural areas in Lombardy to help and educate farmers and workers. Later, Maria, widowed and with her children (born from her ‘free union’ with the anarchist Carlo Civardi), settled in Catania with Peppino Sapienza, ‘the lawyer of the poor’. Goliarda was born from their union.

Life in the Sapienza-Giudice household was permeated by political activism, so it was mostly her brother Ivanoe who took care of little Goliarda. Her attendance of regular public schools was cut short by her father, who did not agree with the Fascist educational philosophy and could not stand seeing his daughter wearing a Fascist uniform to go to school. Freed from regular school routine, the world around her became her school, as is evidenced in the autofictional novels Lettera aperta (1967) and Io, Jean Gabin (2010) which represent this creative time in her life.

Although she was living in one of the least desirable quarters in Catania, and in the patriarchal and hierarchical society of Sicily in the 1930s, Goliarda spent her childhood and first years of adolescence having unique experiences. She learned from artisans how to weave chairs and sew costumes for the marionettes of the traditional Opera de’ Pupi. At the same time, she was privately tutored, learned to play the piano, and went frequently to the cinema. Re-enacting the plots of films that she had seen and playing all the characters in front of families and friends was what she did best and enjoyed.

Having reached puberty, Goliarda’s freedom was restricted, and roaming free in the streets of Catania was replaced by spending more time at home with her friends. Nonetheless, her unique education enhanced her natural theatrical skills, which were well recognized by both her family and the people in her neighbourhood. In 1941, at the age of sixteen, she left for Rome with her mother, to study theatre at the Reale Accademia d’Arte Drammatica [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. Like most Italians, Goliarda’s life was deeply affected by the war. Following her family’s political tradition, she became heavily involved with the partigiani’s actions. After the war she returned to theatre and started acting and working in cinema. In 1947, her long relationship with director Citto Maselli started, lasting until 1965. 

The excitement of acting and working in cinema seemed to fade as Goliarda grew older and, in 1958, writing became her main occupation, though she never found fame in this profession during her lifetime. In the following years, writing also coincided with facing unresolved issues of her childhood and adolescence and confronting the difficult relationship with her mother, Maria Giudice, who died in 1953 after a slow decline. 

Throughout her life, Sapienza suffered from bouts of depression, including a particularly serious episode in 1962, when she spent some time at Rome’s Policlinico and was subject to a round of controversial electroshock therapy, which resulted in temporary memory loss. Re-imagining these and other challenging experiences, she reveals her inner conflicts through narrative in Lettera aperta and Il filo di mezzogiorno (1969). Later in life, Sapienza spent a few days in the Roman women’s prison Rebibbia for having stolen a friend’s jewels, and this unique experience inspired L’università di Rebibbia (1983) and Le certezze del dubbio (1987). These narratives present an unusual experience of prison life, as Sapienza recounts how she found, in jail, a sense of companionship that she had always found it difficult to sustain in the wider community. Her own life experiences are at the core of her production, yet it would not be correct to label all she wrote as ‘autobiography’: Sapienza’s writing rather evades rigid categorisation and self-consciously mixes fact and fiction in order to articulate an eclectic and shifting sense of self.

In what is often taken to be her masterpiece, L’arte della gioia, Sapienza skilfully transforms her own story into an original narration, the heroine of which is a Cinderella who earns for herself the real title of Princess. Sapienza faced an uphill struggle in attempting to secure the publication of the novel, whose controversial protagonist Modesta embodies an unbiddable and iconoclastic model of femininity. Having appeared in a partial edition in 1994, L’arte della gioia was published posthumously in its entirety only in 1998 by Angelo Pellegrino, to whom Sapienza was married for the last seventeen years of her life, and who has worked to advance the publication of her remaining works. 

Goliarda Sapienza died in Gaeta in August 1996. Her writing remains known for its frank and often unorthodox approach to questions of gender, subjectivity, and narrative style. Her posthumously published works include the novels Destino coatto (2002), Io, Jean Gabin (2010), and Appuntamento a Positano (2015). They also include her diaries Il vizio di parlare a me stessa (2011), which covers the period from 1976 to 1989, and La mia parte di gioia (2013), which charts the years from 1989 to 1992. In 2021, Pellegrino edited a collection of Sapienza’s letters for publication, revealing how the emotionally rich prose which characterises her fiction persists across her personal correspondence. Most recently, her work has been gaining traction outside Italy, with translations especially into French by Nathalie Castagné and an English translation of Appuntamento a Positano by Brian Robert Moore entitled Meeting in Positano: A Novel  (2021).
 

Compiled by Maria Teresa Maenza (Omaha); updated by Rebecca Walker (Dublin) [2024]