Silvia Ballestra
Silvia Ballestra was born in Porto San Giorgio, Ascoli Piceno (Marche) in 1969. She graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna and currently lives and works in Milan. The Abruzzi and Marche regions and the cities of Bologna and Milan play an important role in her fiction, where characters are often described as they move from the Italian province to bigger cities and back, a return often followed by a deep-seated sense of displacement.
Ballestra’s first short story was published in 1990 in the Papergang (Under 25 III) anthology edited by the author Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-1991), who played the role of mentor and became an important literary model for many other Italian writers of Ballestra’s generation. Since then, she has written novels, short stories, biographies, children’s fiction, essays and articles, and has translated books from English and French into Italian. Some of her works have been translated into French and German.
Her first book was the collection of short stories Compleanno dell’iguana (1991), which became a bestseller and achieved cult status among the generation of Italians who came of age in the early 1990s, as did Antò Lu Purk, the protagonist of ‘La via per Berlino’, the novella that opened the volume. Antò is a young man from Pescara who attempts to escape the frustrating life of the Abruzzi province first as an unsuccessful university student in Bologna, then as an expatriate in Amsterdam and Berlin, only to discover that he is still unable to overcome his own cultural limitations. Antò’s and his homonymous friends’ misadventures continue in La guerra degli Antò (1992), a satire of student life in Bologna in the early 1990s and of contemporary youth’s political ineffectiveness against the background of the First Gulf War as it plays out in the media. The tragi-comedy of the Antòs narrated in ‘La via per Berlino’ and La guerra degli Antò were republished as a combined text entitled Il disastro degli Antò (1997), and became the basis of the film La guerra degli Antò, written and directed by Riccardo Milani (1999).
Ballestra’s early narrative brought her to the attention of the intellectuals of the Italian neo-avant-garde, in particular Renato Barilli and Nanni Balestrini, who invited her to the first Ricercare meeting. Held in Reggio Emilia in 1993 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1960s avant-garde movement Gruppo 63, this event and the ones that followed on a yearly basis until 2004 had, among others, the purpose of promoting the emerging authors of the so-called ‘pulp generation’. Ballestra’s work was praised for its linguistic experimentation, particularly evident in her use of youth language and jargon and in the adoption of postmodern references to contemporary popular culture, as well as her innovative formal strategies. While she parodied the 1993 Ricercare meeting and its protagonists in the short story ‘Gli orsi (63-93)’, published in her third book, Gli orsi (1994), Ballestra’s links with the neo-avant-garde and the annual Ricercare events remained constant in later years, when she played the role of co-organizer and presenter.
Her dialogues with fellow Marche writer and activist Joyce Lussu, published under the title Joyce L. Una vita contro: diciannove registrazioni su nastro (1996), marked an important change of direction in Ballestra’s work, with the identification of a female literary model and explicit political engagement as guidelines for her subsequent narrative production. Indeed, the long-lasting significance of this personal and intellectual encounter would inspire Ballestra to write a full biography of Lussu about 25 years later (La Sibilla. Vita di Joyce Lussu, 2022). Ballestra's new focus on women’s lives and stories came to fruition in the so-called ‘Nina trilogy’, consisting of La giovinezza della signorina N.N. (1998), Nina (2001), and Il compagno di mezzanotte (2002), three novels connected by recurring characters, places, and female protagonists portrayed as they enter adulthood: the emphasis is on first heterosexual love, female friendship, and pregnancy or new motherhood, all presented as both private and public experiences, with significant political reverberations.
While in the ‘Nina trilogy’ Ballestra deliberately adopts more traditional narrative structures, in Tutto su mia nonna (2005), the first of her novels published by Einaudi in their series ‘Stile libero’, she returns to the more experimental forms of her earlier fiction. This time, however, she tells the story of three generations of women (narrator, mother, and grandmother) who devise their own language, inflected with regional dialect and ironic ‘family sayings’, to communicate with each other and share their experiences from a female perspective. In contrast, the historical novel La seconda Dora (2006) is told in a simple, if lyrical, realist mode, to convey as directly as possible the story of Jewish Dora during the Fascist persecution, the war, and her quietly remarkable life as a schoolteacher in the post-war years. A balance between obvious experimentation and more mainstream forms of narration is carefully negotiated in each of these texts, strictly linked to the political impact Ballestra wishes to achieve. This strategy reappears in I giorni della Rotonda (2009), a fiction that weaves together the memory of 1970s Leftist terrorism, the fall-out of political disenchantment, and the subsequent heroin addiction of a significant part of that generation, contrasted with the quiet resistance to the conservative backlash of many who, like Ballestra herself, grew up in the 1980s in provincial Italy.
Political commentary – present since her early works, as in the references to the rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi in the early 1990s or expressed as a parody of horror and science fiction genres in Gli orsi – becomes increasingly prominent in Ballestra’s mature production. Her belief in the public role of the intellectual inspired her to write two non-fiction works that discuss, respectively, the misogynistic backlash against women in Italian society, institutions, and the media (Contro le donne nei secoli dei secoli, 2006), and the need to uphold, as well as to understand better its social costs, the Law 194 that guarantees women’s reproductive rights, including the right to have an abortion (Piove sul nostro amore. Una storia di donne, medici, aborti, predicatori e apprendisti stregoni, 2008). In the same vein, she contributed, in the role of screenplay supervisor, to Alina Marazzi’s film Vogliamo anche le rose (2007), a documentary on women’s lives and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Ballestra’s contributions to the literary journal Alfabeta2 and the bi-weekly column she wrote for the left-wing newspaper L’Unità during the year 2011, as well as her ongoing commentary on social and political events in traditional and social media, have often focused on the pervasiveness of gender inequality, whether in reference to current news or as a comment on the scant attention paid to women’s contribution to the Italian literary world. To counter the resistance of Italian intellectuals to acknowledge women writers, Ballestra published her first book for children, Christine e la città delle dame (2015), with illustrations by Rita Petruccioli, based on the life of 15th-century Italian-French writer Christine de Pizan: taking on the legacy of Pizan’s own work on the long tradition of women’s culture, Ballestra offers younger readers an alternative female literary model to the male-centric Italian canon.
Her more recent production has continued to highlight Italian women’s experiences, but it has also brought to the fore environmental and ecological themes, as for example in Amiche mie (2014), a polyphonic novel that chronicles the disillusionment of marriage, motherhood, and precarious work from the perspective of four women who share their political and social commitment through food activism. Similarly, in La nuova stagione (2019), the narrative of two sisters who try to sell their inherited land in the Marche interweaves with reflections on the environmental damage caused by corporate agricultural practices and on the patriarchal history of the region. In the same vein, Ballestra’s biography of the artist Tullio Pericoli, Le colline di fronte. Un viaggio intorno alla vita di Tullio Pericoli (2011), is developed around constant considerations on the geographical, historical, and social landscape of the Marche region that has informed both Pericoli’s and Ballestra’s works. The same love and concern for the environment is also central to Ballestra’s reportage on the role and fate of animals (abandoned, hurt, rescued, and heroic saviours of their human friends), following the devastating earthquakes of 2016 in the Tronto Valley and other parts of central Italy (Vicini alla terra. Storie di animali e di uomini che non li dimenticano quando tutto trema, 2017).
Ballestra has been awarded a number of literary prizes, including the Premio Fiesole Narrativa Under 40 in 1993 for La guerra degli Antò, the Premio Rapallo Carige per la Donna Scrittrice in 2006 for La seconda Dora, and the Premio Nazionale di Cultura Benedetto Croce Narrativa in 2020 for La nuova stagione. La Sibilla. Vita di Joyce Lussu was a finalist for the prestigious Premio Campiello. It won the Premio Letterario Pozzale Luigi Russo in 2023.
Compiled by Claudia Bernardi (Wellington), updated 2024
Bibliography
Short Stories
Compleanno dell’iguana (Ancona: Transeuropa/Milan: Mondadori, 1991)
Gli orsi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994)
Romanzi e racconti (Rome: Theoria, 1999)
Senza gli orsi [with illustrations by Alberto Rebori] (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003)
‘Le seguo da lontano’ in Trame: A Contemporary Italian Reader ed. by Cristina Abbona-Sneider, Antonello Borra, and Cristina Pausini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 10-14; first published in D La Repubblica delle donne, 30 July 2005, p. 30)
Graphic Short Story
‘Darlings, Are You Here or Aren’t You?’. Adaptation of ‘Cari, ci siete o no?’ (in Gli orsi) as a graphic short story, English text by Silvia Ballestra and artwork by Alberto Rebori (orig. published in The Literary Review. An International Journal of Contemporary Writing, 49.1, 2005, pp. 143-147) available online at https://www.albertorebori.com/it/storie/ballestra
Novels
La guerra degli Antò (Ancona: Transeuropa/Milan: Mondadori, 1992; Turin: Einaudi, 2005)
Il disastro degli Antò [it includes ‘La via per Berlino’ (1991) and La guerra degli Antò (1992)] (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997)
La giovinezza della signorina N.N. Una storia d’amore (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998)
Romanzi e racconti (Rome: Theoria, 1999)
Nina (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001)
Il compagno di mezzanotte (Milan: Rizzoli, 2002)
Tutto su mia nonna (Turin: Einaudi, 2005)
La seconda Dora (Milan: Rizzoli, 2006)
I giorni della Rotonda (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009)
Amiche mie (Milan: Mondadori, 2014)
La nuova stagione (Milan: Bompiani, 2019)
Children’s Literature
Christine e la città delle dame [with illustrations by Rita Petruccioli] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2015)
Biographies
Joyce L. Una vita contro. Diciannove conversazioni incise su nastro (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1996; Milan: Dalai Editore, 2012)
‘Su Nazim. Conversazione con Joyce Lussu’ in Joyce Lussu: Il turco in Italia (ovvero l’italiana in Turchia). Una biografia di Nazim Hikmet (Ancona: Transeuropa, 1998, pp. 5-18)
Le colline di fronte. Un viaggio intorno alla vita di Tullio Pericoli (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011)
La Sibilla. Vita di Joyce Lussu (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2022)
Articles and Essays
‘Intrappolato in questo rock’ (Panta, 9, 1992, pp. 329-335)
‘Un’ora sola con ciò che resta di mia madre. Un piccolo evento di culto lo struggente, bellissimo racconto per immagini di Alina Marazzi’ (L’Unità, 23 February 2003, p. 30)
‘I lettori li incontro alle presentazioni dei libri’ in Mica male il tuo libro. Racconti e aneddoti sull’incontro-scontro con il lettore ed. by Alberto Sebastiani (Reggio Emilia: Aliberti, 2006, pp. 17-20)
Contro le donne nei secoli dei secoli (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2006)
Piove sul nostro amore. Una storia di donne, medici, aborti, predicatori e apprendisti stregoni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008)
‘L’industria del libro di massa’ (Alfabeta2, 1, July-August 2010)
‘Sporcarsi le mani’ (Alfabeta2, 2, September 2010)
‘Eppure’ (Alfabeta2, 5, December 2010)
Vicini alla terra. Storie di animali e di uomini che non li dimenticano quando tutto trema (Milan: Giunti, 2017)
'Prefazione' to Pina Rota Fo: Il paese delle rane (Milan: Astoria, 2020; digital edition 2021, pp. 7-13)
Anthology
[ed. with Giulio Mozzi] Coda. Undici ‘under 25’ nati dopo il 1970 (Ancona: Transeuropa, 1996) [short stories by new Italian writers]
Screenwriting
Vogliamo anche le rose, a documentary written and directed by Alina Marazzi, with Ballestra in the role of screenplay supervisor (Italy and Switzerland: Mir Cinematografica, Rai Cinema, and Ventura Film, 2007)
Translations into Italian by Ballestra
La mano negra in Colombia. Alice nel paese delle guerriglie [Translation of Ramón Chao’s Un train de glace et de feu] (Milan: Theoria, 1996); republished as La mano negra in Colombia (Milan: Costa & Nolan, 2009)
Scrivere Bop. Lezioni di scrittura creativa [Translation of a selection of Jack Kerouac’s writings] (Milan: Mondadori, 1996)
Manon Lescaut [Translation of Antoine Françoise Prévost’s Manon Lescaut] (Turin: Einaudi, 1998)
Oggi sposi [Translation of Joe Keenan’s Blue Heaven] (Milan: Zelig, 1998)
Vorrei che da qualche parte ci fosse qualcuno ad aspettarmi [Translation of Anna Gavalda’s Je voudrais que quelqu’un m’attende quelque part, with also an introduction by Ballestra] (Milan: Frassinelli, 2001)
La stella d’Algeri [Translation of Aziz Chouaki’s L’Ètoile d’Alger] (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2003)
Io l’amavo [Translation of Anna Gavalda’s Je l’aimais] (Milan: Frassinelli, 2003)
L’eliminazione [Translation of Rithy Pahn’s (with Christophe Bataille) L’élimination] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2014)
Il progetto Blumkin [Translation of Christian Salmon’s Le Projet Blumkine] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2017)
Una vita senza fine [Translation of Frédèric Beigbeder’s Une vie sans fin] (Milan: Bompiani, 2019)
Translations into Foreign Languages
Catalan
Una nòva epoca [Translation of La nuova stagione by Anna Casassas] (Manresa (Bages): Països Catalans Tigre de Paper, 2021)
English
‘The Fragment of a Thriller’ [Translation of ‘Cari, ci siete o no?’ (in Gli orsi) by Minna Proctor] in After the War: A Collection of Short Fiction by Postwar Italian Women ed. by Martha King (New York: Italica Press, 2004, pp. 1-14)
French
La Route de Berlin [Translation of ‘La via per Berlino’ (in Compleanno dell’iguana) by Nicole Sels] (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1993)
Les Ours [Translation of Gli orsi by Jean-Paul Manganaro] (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 2002)
La Jeunesse de mademoiselle X: Une histoire d’amour [Translation of La giovinezza della signorina N.N. Una storia d’amore by Nathalie Bauer] (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 2002)
Nina [Translation of Nina by Nathalie Bauer] (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 2003)
German
Der Weg nach Berlin [Translation of ‘La via per Berlino’ (in Compleanno dell’iguana) by Peter Klöss] (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1994)
Criticism
Arcangeli, Massimo: Giovani scrittori, scritture giovani: ribelli, sognatori, cannibali, bad girls (Rome: Carocci, 2007)
Balestrini, Nanni and Renato Barilli [eds]: La bestia 1. Narrative invaders! (Rome: Costa & Nolan, 1997)
Balestrini, Nanni, Renato Barilli, Ivano Burani, and Giuseppe Caliceti: Narrative invaders. Narratori di ‘Ricercare’ 1993-1999 (Turin: Testo & Immagine, 2000)
Barilli, Renato: È arrivata la terza ondata. Dalla neo-avanguardia alla neo-neo-avanguardia (Turin: Testo & Immagine, 2000)
Bernardi, Claudia: ‘Exiles/Nomads: Journeys through Language and Gender in Italian Women’s Pulp Fiction of the 1990s’ (Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe, 16.1, 2003, pp. 41-64)
─: ‘Collective Memory and Childhood Narratives: Re-writing the 1970s in the 1990s’ in Speaking Out and Silencing. Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s ed. by Anna Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio (Leeds: MHRA Legenda, 2006, pp. 185-200)
─: ‘Recalcitrant Daughters: The Search for Literary Mothers in Italian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s’ in Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy ed. by Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 69-84)
─: The 'Pulp' Generation between Avant-garde and Tradition(s): Legacies, Gender and Youth Culture in the Narrative of Silvia Ballestra, Rossana Campo and Isabella Santacroce [PhD dissertation] (University of Bath, 2009)
─: ‘Impegno in the Work of Silvia Ballestra: A Space of Political Engagement between Realism and Postmodernism’ (Italian Studies in Southern Africa/Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe, 24.1, 2011, pp. 151-176)
─: ‘Narratrici italiane tra tradizioni e avanguardie 1990-2010’ (Nuova prosa, 64.1, 2014, pp. 41-75)
─: ‘Happy Hours: Food, Politics and Female Friendship in Silvia Ballestra’s Amiche mie’ in Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society ed. by Claudia Bernardi, Francesca Calamita, and Daniele De Feo (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 176-187)
Brioni, Cecilia: ‘Leaving the Group: Bologna as an Urban Mythscape for 1990s Italian Youth’ (Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 8.2, 2021, pp. 207-226)
Burns, Jennifer: ‘Silvia Ballestra: Irony and Anthropology’ in Fragments of Impegno: Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980-2000 (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2001, pp. 139-157)
Caredda, Anna: ‘Silvia Ballestra. L’autobiografia, il gioco, il romanzesco’ [it includes ‘1. Scheda introduttiva’ and ‘2. Intervista a Silvia Ballestra’] in Giuliana Adamo et al.: Narrativa italiana recente/Recent Italian Fiction (Turin: Trauben/Dublin: Department of Italian, Trinity College, 2005, pp. 75-93)
Carnero, Roberto: Under 40: I giovani nella nuova narrativa italiana (Milan: Mondadori, 2010)
Castaldi, Simone: ‘Tra pulp e avanguardia: realismo nella narrativa italiana degli anni Novanta’ (Italica, 84.2-3, 2007, pp. 368-381)
Contarini, Silvia: ‘L’eredità della neoavanguardia nei romanzi di Silvia Ballestra, Rossana Campo e Carmen Covito’ (Narrativa, 8, 1995, pp. 75-99)
Gareffi, Andrea: ‘Silvia Ballestra, La Buriniade’ in Riccardo Scrivano et al.: Il romanzo contemporaneo: Atti del trentesimo seminario Biblioteca ProCivitate Christiana, Assisi (Lecce: Pietro Manni, 1998, pp. 36-47)
Janusz, Joanna: ‘Mondo di donne, mondo di parole. Espressione linguistica della condizione femminile in Tutto su mia nonna di Silvia Ballestra’ (Romanica Silesiana, 8.2, 2013, pp. 59-67)
La Porta, Filippo: La nuova narrativa italiana. Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003)
Liano, Dante and Raffaella Odicino: ‘Lengua de la norma y jerga juvenil. Apuntes sopbe “Beatriz y los cuerpo celestes” de Lucía Extebarría y “La via per Berlino” (Compleanno dell’iguana) de Silvia Ballestra’ in Lingua e letteratura dei paesi ispanici ed. by Dante Liano (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2006, pp. 69-87)
Litherland, Kate: Pulp: Youth, Language, Popular Culture and Literature in 1990s Italian Fiction. PhD dissertation (University of Leicester, 2006)
─: ‘Translating “America” in 90s Italian Fiction’ in Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture ed. by Ashley Chantler and Carla Dente, introd. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 115-128)
Lucamante, Stefania [ed.]: Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001)
Manai, Franco: ‘Guerra in trincea e guerra in televisione nei romanzi di Emilio Lussu e Silvia Ballestra’ (Cahiers d’ètudes italiennes. Nocecento... e dintorni. Images littéraires de la société contemporaine, 3, 2005, pp. 29-55)
─: ‘La narrativa regionale italiana e la politica subalterna della sinistra’ (Textes & Contextes, 2, 2008) available online at https://preo.u-bourgogne.fr/textesetcontextes/index.php?id=139
Marchioni Cucchiella, Anna: ‘Space and Sexuation in the Fin the Siécle Italian Female Narrative’ in Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture ed. by Virginia Picchietti and Laura A. Salsini (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 249-271)
Mondello, Elisabetta: In principio fu Tondelli. Letteratura, merci, televisione nella narrativa degli anni Novanta (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2007)
Mondello, Elisabetta [ed.]: La narrativa italiana degli anni novanta (Rome: Meltemi, 2004)
Ottonieri, Tommaso: ‘La lettera, il fuoco: Saggio su Silvia Ballestra’ (Verri: Rivista di Letteratura, 3-4, 1995, pp. 113-132)
Piechocki, Katharina: ‘“Transglobal Destroy”? Zapping Female Italian Novelists at the Turn of the Millennium’ (Interlitteraria, 9, 2004, pp. 102-119)
Seger, Monica: ‘Passing the Remote: Community and Television Viewing in Woobinda and La querra degli Antò’ (California Italian Studies, 2.2, 2011) available online at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16k1n83j
Sinibaldi, Marino: Pulp. La narrativa nell’era della simultaneità (Rome: Donzelli, 1997)
Spunta, Marina: ‘The “Young” Orality of the 1990s: Campo, Ballestra, and Nove’ in Voicing the Word: Writing Orality in Contemporary Italian Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 229-270)
─: ‘Voicing Female Subjectivity: Autobiography and Authority in Silvia Ballestra and Joyce Lussu’ in Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy. Essays for Sharon Wood ed. by Simona Storchi, Marina Spunta, and Maria Morelli (Leicester: Troubador, 2017, pp. 91-105)
Storini, Monica Cristina: ‘4.3.1. Ironia e voce narrante nella scrittura di Silvia Ballestra’ in L’esperienza problematica: Generi e scrittura nella narrativa italiana del Novecento (Rome: Carocci, Università degli Studi ‘La Sapienza’, 2005, pp. 248-253)
Tondelli, Pier Vittorio: ‘Commento ai testi. Silvia Ballestra’ in Pier Vittorio Tondelli: Opere. Cronache, saggi, conversazioni ed. by Fulvio Panzeri (Milan: Bompiani, 2001, pp. 765-766)
Vittori, Maria Vittoria: ‘Le soglie del tempo. Passaggi e crocevia delle età nel racconto delle donne’ (Storia delle donne, 2.1, 2006, pp. 79-95)
Interviews/in the Media
Printed Interviews
Briganti, Annarita: ‘Quattro amiche (più una) al bar in libera uscita da figli e mariti’ (La Repubblica, 26 February 2014)
Caliceti, Giuseppe [ed.]: ‘Silvia Ballestra’ in /bao’bab/Autodizionario (Reggio Emilia: Comune di Reggio Emilia, Assessorato alla cultura e sapere, Biblioteca di San Pellegrino, 2000, pp. 11-13)
Colombo, Severino: ‘Silvia Ballestra e le lasagne pelose’ (Il Corriere della sera, 14 April 2014, p. 11)
Desideri, Giovanni: ‘In Italia la famiglia si sostituisce al Welfare’ (Il Messaggero, 20 February 2014)
Imbó, Antonio and Monica Venturini: ‘Non solo di piombo: due decenni a confronto. Colloquio con Silvia Ballestra; Il corvo e l’atomo’ (Caffé Michelangiolo, 3, 2009, pp. 1000-1004)
Monti, Daniela: ‘Donne in una società bloccata. Dobbiamo ripartire dal via?’ (Il Corriere della sera, 1 February 2011, p. 9)
Pallavicini, Piersandro: ‘Intervista a Silvia Ballestra’ (Pulp, 17, 1999, pp. 74-75)
Persico, Daniela: ‘Una conversazione con Alina Marazzi e Silvia Ballestra’ in Le rose ed. by Alina Marazzi (Milan: Feltrinelli Real Cinema, 2008, pp. 11-34)
Valerio, Chiara: ‘Quattro amiche al bar. Mogli e madri si raccontano un mondo: il nuovo romanzo di Silvia Ballestra’ (L’Unità, 18 March 2014, p.17)
Video Interviews
Ghilardi, Margherita: ‘Scrittrici in tazza – Dialogo con Silvia Ballestra: La nuova stagione’ (Todo Modo, 25 March 2021, video interview, 57minutes) available online at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=208049594438386
Grillo, Stella : ‘Intervista a Silvia Ballestra – Premio Campiello 2023’ (Libreriamo, 30 August 2023, video interview, 37 minutes) available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA2MDcL_Nmw&t=322s
Film Adaptations
Milani, Riccardo [director ad co-writer]: La guerra degli Antò (Italy: Cecchi Gori Group, Fin. Ma. Vi., 1999), based on Ballestra's ‘La via per Berlino’ (in Compleanno dell’iguana) and La guerra degli Antò