I first came across the work of Dacia Maraini during the year of #WaferThinBooks, when I read Isolina, her reconstruction of the murder of a poor pregnant young woman in Verona. I was drawn to it principally because it met the #WaferThinBooks criterion (under 150 pages long) and because I knew something of Verona from having lived there as a child in the 1960s.
In January 1900, two women washing clothes along the banks of the Adige river in Verona spotted a bundle floating in weeds. With the help of a boy fishing nearby, they pulled it onto the shore. The boy cut the string and the three were horrified to see parts of a human body that had been cut up. The police soon determined that the body was that of Isolina Cantu, a young woman from a nearby neighborhood who had been reported missing a few days earlier.
The autopsy showed that Isolina had not only been dismembered but had been the victim of a brutal abortion so ineptly done that it likely caused the hemorrhage that killed her. Further investigations uncovered the fact that the father of her child was most probably Carlo Trivulzio, a lieutenant with the Alpini regiment stationed in Verona, and that the abortion had been carried out by a group of Alpini officers, possibly with Trivulzio, in a back room at the restaurant where they liked to gather. Isolina’s sister and friends all knew that Trivulzio began sleeping with her soon after he rented a room at the Cantu’s house and that he had already given her some potion intended to make her abort.
Arrested on suspicion of murder, Trivulzio pleaded innocence. “I swear to you,” he wrote his commanding officer, “that were I the person guilty I would already have killed myself.” Trivulzio was soon released and left Verona for his home in Udine.
From that point on, the newspapers in Verona debated and microanalyzed the evidence in the case, quickly forming and defending two sides in the case. The conservative papers sided with Trivulzio and the Army, mocking all suggestions of their culpability and attacking Isolina as an ignorant tramp who slept with numerous men and deserved her fate: “A slut, a prostitute! If she put up with violence it means she wanted it!” The socialist papers made her into a martyr, a symbol of how Italy’s ruling classes abused and silenced its poor and working people.
Finally, in November 1901, almost two years after the murder, Carlo Trivulzio sued Mario Todeschini, the editor of Verona del Populo for defamation of character. In a fantastic turnabout, Trivulzio wasn’t defending himself but was launching into a frontal attack on the leftist press. As reported by a paper sympathetic to Todeschini, Trivulzio “laughs impudently in this courtroom, appears self-confident, never penitent, never sorry, never moved.” An illustration from L’Illustrazione Italiana bears out this description.
The simmering conflicts between the classes in Verona came to a head in the Todeschini trial, which drew out over six weeks. Some days the crowd of spectators was so large that it streamed out of the court and down the staircase into the street. Dozens of witnesses were called by both sides, but none of the evidence mattered as much as the court’s belief in the preeminence of defending the status quo. The judges not only found Todeschini guilt but sentenced him to two years in prison in addition to thousands of lire in fines and court costs. At most, Maraini writes, they considered Trivulzio “irresponsible,” but concluded, “What, finally, did the life of a girl from a poor, obscure family count for, when opposed to the honor of the Army?”
Maraini keeps herself mostly in the background in telling Isolina’s story, though she does tell of her exhaustion in running into brick walls at almost every turn. She has to rely on newspapers, for example, because most of the municipal records in Verona have been destroyed — some in Allied bombing during World War Two, but more through simple administrative apathy. But “wiping out a life is not easy,” she writes. “Something always remains which refuses to be destroyed, reduced to nothing.” In piecing together the evidence against Trivulzio and the scattered fragments of testimony in defense of Isolina’s right to be remembered as more than just a victim, Maraini tries to give back a bit of the justice denied her.
By the time Dacia Maraini became interested in Isolina Cantu’s story, she had made her own remarkable journey from victim to advocate. Maraini’s parents were an unconventional couple. Her mother, Topazia Alliata, had ignored the protests of her family of Sicilian nobility to marry Fosco Maraini, an anthropologist disowned by his father for refusing to join the Fascists. In 1938 at the age of two, she traveled with her parents to Japan, where her father had a grant to study the Ainu, the near-extinct native people of the island of Hokkaido. “Remember that races do not exist,” Maraini remembers her father telling her from a young age. “There are different cultures, but races do not exist.”
From Sapporo, the family moved to Kyoto, which Fosco obtained a post with a Japanese university. Two more daughters were born, all mixing with their neighbors and picking up as much Japanese as Italian. Maraini later recalled running to the local police station when her father accused her of destroying one of his books and, when he finally located her, declaring in fluent Kyoto dialect that she preferred to stay there and become a policeman. Maraini’s most recent book to be translated into English, The Ship for Kobe, is a memoir of those first years in Japan, framed around excerpts from her mother’s diary.
In late 1943, after the Allies took Rome and Mussolini formed the Republic of Salò, the Japanese interned the Maraini in a concentration camp near Nagoya. The Japanese considered them traitors and not only provided below-subsistence rations but made a show of destroying all letters and packages sent to them from Italy. Maraini believes that her youngest sister only survived because one guard, perhaps feeling sorry after he beat up her father, brought the family a goat to supply them with milk. Although Maraini writes that she would leave it to her sister Yuki to write about their time in the camp, in 2024 she published Vita Mia (an English translation is supposedly forthcoming).
After Japan’s surrender in September 1945, the Marainis were returned to Italy. Having no home of their own, they were begrudgingly given a few rooms in a villa in Bagheria, Sicily owned by Topazia’s family. Though a few of her mother’s relatives accepted the Marainis, most ostracized them. In her 1993 memoir, Bagheria, Maraini recalls those first years back in Italy. Early on in this book, she confronts a long-suppressed memory of being taken into a room by a family friend and being forced to put her hand around his penis while he became aroused. As she writes in Bagheria,
Years later, during the seventies and eighties, I found myself with friends in one of the “self-awareness” groups (as they were then called) that formed the backbone of the women’s movement. We would meet for lunch or supper when we were free of our respective jobs, and we talked for hours on end, taking turns to analyse methodically our earliest experiences connected with the discovery of sex, love, the desire for children and so on. It was then I discovered that so-called sexual abuse of children by adults was very common and well known to all, or almost all, little girls. They often kept quiet about it for the rest of their lives, terrified by threats and intimidations from the men who had taken them into dark corners, always feeling guilty as if it was they who had stretched out their hands, conceived forbidden thoughts and provoked the uncertain desires of men, even though the reality was quite the opposite. And once it came to light, they had to struggle with incredulous mothers who were ready to lay all the blame on their daughters, instead of on fathers, lovers, cousins, brothers, and friends of the family.
Bagheria was Maraini’s first best-seller in Italy, and in part it was because of her candor in dealing with this and other painful experiences, a candor that had taken years to mature. Her second novel, and first to be translated into English, L’età del malessere (The Age of Malaise) (1963), which won the Prix Formentor, was criticized for its portrait of “a purposeless non-professional young Roman woman roams from bed to bed.” Most reviewers saw Maraini’s 17-year-old Enrica as an empty-headed nymphomaniac — completely failing to recognize that the men she was sleeping with were willfully exploiting her. And some, considering the novel in light of Maraini’s own development, argue that the failure of recognition was hers, too.
Maraini married the painter Lucio Pozzi in 1959, but the couple separated soon after Maraini had a miscarriage. By 1962, she was living with the novelist Alberto Moravia and Pozzi had moved to the United States (on a grant arranged by Moravia). Though she lived with Moravia for over twenty years, Maraini came to view marriage as a form of slavery, a position she took most strongly in her novel Donna in guerra (Woman at War) (1975/1984) and her story collection Mio marito (My Husband) (1974/2004).
By the late 1960s, Maraini had become a vocal feminist and social critic. She established and ran a women’s theater group, La Maddalena, that performed experimental plays in Rome, including Maraini’s Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client. As Anna Camaiti Hostert writes in her afterword to Maraini’s most successful novel, La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (The Silent Duchess) (1990/1992), “For Maraini, prostitution is a metaphor. Historically, women have traded their bodies for money, protection, or security. To this day, girls are educated to use their bodies to gain favor, acceptance, a partner, a job, or whatever else they want.”
Maraini also became an advocate for the rights of women in prison around this time. Her novel Memorie di una ladra (Memoirs of a Female Thief) (1973/1974) is a loosely fictionalized composite of several women she interviewed, an attempt to create a portrait that straddled the victimization of lower-class Italian women, particularly those raised in families involved with the Mafia, and the classical traditions of the picaresque novel. Teresa Numa, the protagonist, resorts to crime to survive her poverty and squalor, but Maraini also sees her as triumphant in her ingenuity and tenacity. Memorie di una ladra was filmed with Monica Vitti in the title role as Teresa la Ladra (available without subtitles on YouTube).
Maraini distilled decades of observations about the exploitation of the weak in her collection Buio (Darkness) (1999/2002). Told as if they were cases of a sympathetic police commissioner named Adele Sofia, these stories involve exploitation of the most extreme forms. A little boy lured from his home by a pedophile who encourages him to see his yellow shoes as bird’s feet. An Albanian girl sold into child prostitution by her parents (“If they ask you how old you are, tell them seventeen, kuptove“). A boy raped and murdered by his father. A wife forced by her husband to have sex with strangers while he watches — or face being beaten into unconsciousness. Darkness is easily one of the darkest books I’ve ever read, but it makes clear that Maraini is unapologetically on the side of the victims. “Children should always be believed before adults,” she told one interviewer, was her firm principle after reviewing files on hundreds of police cases.
Darkness also exemplifies Maraini’s view of the function of the writer in society. “A writer is a witness,” she has said, “someone who has participated or has watched a crime unfold…. The writer is a witness who has to tell the truth … the small, little truths that remain a part of everyday life.”
Though she will soon turn 90, Dacia Maraini continues to write at a prolific rate, and always focusing on giving voices to silenced women. In Chiara d’Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza (In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi) (2013/2023), she receives a series of impassioned letters from a young woman in Sicily who urges Maraini to look into the story of St. Clare of Assisi. “What do you want from me?” Maraini replies with dismay at first. “I know nothing about Saint Clare, nor do I want to.” But as her correspondent persists, she begins to research the saint and forms a view that her decision to enter the convent was a rejection of the grim choice facing most women of her time: “Marry at 13, bear many children, watch most of them die, grow old early,” as Maraini once put it in a talk at Bryn Mawr College.
Clare, she argues, chose life a nun as a way to break free from the control of men: “To have property meant to be controlled. A control that was economic, political …and rigorously masculine.” And as Maraini learns more about Clare’s life, and the intellectual and spiritual freedom she was able to achieve within the narrow confines of the convent and medieval Catholicism, she unknowingly persuades the young woman in Sicily to come to her own rejection of what she sees as the still masculine-dominated world of the 21st century.
I can only hope that Maraini’s most recent book, Scritture Segrete: Le donne che hanno cambiato il mondo con la parola (Secret Writings: The Women Who Changed the World with Their Words), an anthology of the work of over 80 women writers, from Julia the Elder (daughter of Augustus) to Michela Murgia. As she writes in her introduction, this collection is a celebration of the persistence of the underdogs, the victories of the victims. “I am always moved by the energy with which my fellow women strive to adapt to a history written by the winners, pursuing a language that has always cast them as the minority.”
Maraini decided to publish the book after she briefly lost the ability to read due to problems with her vision. When she regained her eyesight, she writes, “I was happy to have my brain dancing and singing to the rhythm of the words.” Even more than her passion for writing, as she declares in The Ship for Kobe, “Even today I become listless and sad if I don’t have a story that captures me and takes me by the hand into unknown landscapes, in rooms not mine, in distant and seductive times. I couldn’t live without reading.”
I don’t know how much longer Dacia Maraini will be writing, but she can count on having readers happy to have her take them by the hand and lead them into unknown — if often grim and dark — landscapes. English language readers should seek out her work, and we should keep our fingers crossed that more of her substantial opera will be translated in the coming years.
Thank you for introducing me to this interesting and evidently important writer. You do good work here!
Thank you!
Thank you so much for this detailed listing of her works. I had never heard of her but now I know I want to read several of these books. I appreciate your efforts.
You’re very welcome. Maraini certainly deserves to be better known.