Skip to main content
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Michela Marzano

Michela_Marzano (MEDEF WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Michela Marzano (Photo: MEDEF via WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Born in Rome in 1970, Michela Marzano is an Italian philosopher, politician, and prolific writer based in France. She received her PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa before moving to Paris. She is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Paris V René Descartes and a regular contributor to Italian leading newspapers, such as La Repubblica and La Stampa. In 2013, she was elected to the Italian Parliament for a party oriented to the left; however, she did not run for the elections in 2018 and she is not currently affiliated to a political party. She regularly interacts with her followers on several social media platforms and her blog.

Marzano’s popular autobiography Volevo essere una farfalla (2011) marked her entry into contemporary Italian women’s writing. It was followed by the Bancarella literary prize in 2014 with L’amore è tutto. È tutto ciò che so dell’amore (2013), a stream of consciousness narrative focusing on her interpersonal relationships and how they have influenced her experiences as a woman.

Since the beginning of her academic and literary career she has experimented with different genres, ranging from scholarly essays to essays on topical issues that appeal to a wide readership, to autobiography and fiction, and has written on a variety of subjects. As an academic, her main research interests are moral philosophy and ethics: published in French, her work focuses in particular on the body − Penser le corps (2002), La philosophie du corps (2007), and Dictionnaire du corps (2007) − and pornography − Alice au pays du porno (2005) and Malaise dans la sexualité (2006). Some of the essays originally written in French have been translated into Italian and Spanish.

The body seems to be the common denominator of her output, both philosophical and narrative. In Volevo essere una farfalla she reveals her life-long battle with anorexia nervosa and the difficult journey to overcome her illness, sending a message of hope to all women battling with eating disorders. Volevo essere una farfalla is a ground-breaking text, where her philosophical knowledge of the body is combined with her personal experience as a present-day woman; furthermore, in this book for the first time an acclaimed academic describes her eating disorder, a subject that has been explored by women writers before, but never so directly. This autobiography is one of the few examples in contemporary Italian women’s writing where different interpretations of anorexia are brought together to explain the pathology in its entirety: scientifically and personally.

In 2010 Marzano published Sii bella e stai zitta. Perché l’Italia di oggi offende le donne, a full account of the social constrictions and contradictions imposed on Italian women in contemporary times, shedding new light on the cultural regression of Italian women in Berlusconi’s age. She talks extensively about women’s bodies and how they have become a public battleground, taking forward the debate on the burkini which sparked in Europe, and particularly in France, in the summer of 2016. Mamma, papà e gender (2015), a reflection on the ‘no-gender-ideology’ debate which is currently raging in Italian society, was followed by two novels, L’amore che mi resta (2017) and Idda (2019), dealing with identity and family relationships, especially between women. Her latest publication, Stirpe e vergogna (2021), focuses on her experience with her fascist grandfather and on her reaction and compromises after discovering his troubling past.

Compiled by Francesca Calamita (Virginia)