Fabrizia Ramondino

1936–2008

Ramondino is the youngest writer in this anthology, and Althénopis, a fugue-like autobiographical first novel, inspired by her itinerant childhood, is her masterpiece. A leftist intellectual and community organizer, she was raised largely outside Italy, in Spain, France and Germany. Her father, a diplomat, died when she was young. In her mid-twenties she came to Naples and made it her base. Despite her vagabond nature, or perhaps because of it, she was fascinated by spaces that contained and confined, writing a meditative book called L’isola riflessa (The Reflected Island), about the time she spent, in a period of acute crisis, on Ventotene, a tiny island off the coast between Rome and Naples where the Emperor Augustus banished one of his daughters for adultery, where Mussolini interned enemies nearby and where, in 1941, the confined writer Altiero Spinelli, in collaboration with others, wrote a pioneering manifesto that paved the way for European unification (and the European Union). Ramondino dedicated another work to the experiences of women in a mental institution in Trieste. Spatial constriction is central to this story, which focuses tightly on a handful of characters simultaneously bound together and splintered. Despite being a chamber piece, it comments broadly and caustically on the effects of the economic boom that followed the Second World War, the consequences of the great migration of southern Italians to the north, and the dissolution of the traditional family structure. Ramondino writes with exceptional lucidity about states of emotional and physical distress. She also writes candidly about her struggle with alcoholism. In 1996 she joined a film crew that shot a documentary, partly commissioned by Unicef, about the exiled Sahrawi community in West Africa. Ramondino loved the sea, such that it was an element in nearly everything she wrote. She died suddenly after feeling ill while swimming close to the shore of southern Italy. Her last novel, La via (The Way), was published the following day.

The Tower

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

The bus dropped them off on Saturday: the father, the mother, the cat in its basket, the daughter. The house, the father’s, was like his others. On the kitchen table, the woman set out a few of the provisions she’d brought with her, along with some other things she’d found in the house, including lots of wine. They ate cheerfully. The father said: ‘It’s like an Easter antipasto.’ Indeed, there were hard-boiled eggs, cheese and olives. The woman was tired – her menstrual period had just started – and she went to bed with a novel and the radio, that alternated between opera arias and programmes on RAI3.¹ Daughter and father, armed with flashlights, went to explore the tower. ‘Careful not to fall, there’s a step missing!’ the father said, or: ‘A thousand years ago, soldiers kept watch through these embrasures,’ just as children were told thirty years ago. At the top of the tower: wind, stars, the cat between their feet, disoriented by strange smells.