Cristina Campo

1923–77

A writer’s writer who published very little in her lifetime, Campo, who came from an aristocratic family, was the daughter of an openly Fascist composer. She was born with a grave heart condition, inoperable at the time, which prevented her from playing vigorously with other children and from attending school. This sense of solitude characterizes her project as a writer, which mines a consistently interior, spiritual vein. Her creativity was a vocation in the truest sense; always at a remove, indifferent to attention or success. Her real name was Vittoria Guerrini; the name Cristina Campo was invented when she was around thirty years old. Educated by tutors but largely self-taught, she learned to read in French, German, Spanish and Latin. Katherine Mansfield was one of the first authors she translated. She also translated the work of Emily Dickinson, John Donne, William Carlos Williams and Simone Weil, introducing the latter’s writing to Italy. Campo lived for most of her life in Rome, on a secluded piazza dominated by an enormous abbey, and was openly involved for twenty years with Elémire Zolla, a married man who was a scholar and philosopher of esoteric doctrine and mysticism. She wrote criticism about fairy tales and turned emphatically to religion towards the end of her life. Perfection was her theme, aesthetic as well as moral. This autobiographical story, isolated in the appendix of a volume of her essays, introductions and translator’s notes, is a hallucinatory remembrance of an unconventional, encumbered childhood. It is about the enchantment of reading, the enigmas of adulthood and the slippery border between literature and life. The book’s title is Sotto falso nome (Under a False Name). She left behind several volumes of magnificent letters, all of them signed Cristina Campo.

The Golden Nut

Translated by Jenny McPhee

Ave, viaticum meae peregrinationis.

Cicero

Children born on Sunday have the gift of being able to see the fairies who preside over their baptism.

Karl Felix Wolff

Over a string of long and glorious summers, every afternoon at half past four, the watered-down gravel on the driveway crackled furtively, almost ceremoniously, under the tyres of the blue Dilambda. The car had driven up along the ancient Via Cavaliera’s scalding, dusky portico, flashed beneath the light-splattered leaves of the linden trees lining the Via dei Cappuccini, passed by the inane patrician gates surrounding the Villa Revedin, in order to arrive at the top of our hill. Reacting to the cold roar of the tyres, combined with the midday heat and cicadas, I threw my tricycle on to the lawn, and Luigi, priest-like in his red jacket, flung open the small glass door wreathed in bronzed ivy, while my beautiful older cousins, Zarina and Maria Sofia, fluttered forth from the car like birds. The pure white of the last bridal-wreath spirea, the petals already strewn over the gravel, instantly mirrored the new whites – my cousins’ long gloves, their little sectional cloche hats, the freshly washed fur of their old Sealyham terrier, and above all, their bags, those deep sacks made of linen or canvas in which, afternoon upon afternoon, from the gloomy and oppressive rooms on Via Cavaliera, their old toys made their way up to me.