[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_43

Private Renaissance, Maria Bellonci, 1985

Any Italian school book mentions the Strega Prize, one of the most important Italian literary competitions in the last fifty years. What is rarely mentioned is the name of its co-founder, Maria Bellonci, who is also a writer.

It is not a question of damnatio memoriae, that is, the explicit desire not to mention a character to eliminate them from History, but the result of discrimination, in the original and literal sense of the word, which is that of choice, distinction. In a long list of Italian writers, only those who stood out, who were recognized as having "more value" (having distinction), were the object of choice (discrimination).

It appears that almost all those with value in Italy are men. Grazia Deledda is often the only gender-representative exception in Italian anthologies for kids because she won the Nobel Prize. "Private Renaissance" is a voice of justice that comes from a past that is not as distant as the historical setting would have us believe.

Bellonci, through a careful study of historical sources, reconstructs the psychological morphology of Isabella d'Este’s character, tearing her away from the two-dimensionality that male historical narratives had given her; and returning her to the human panorama with its facets and complexity as a historical figure, human being, and woman.

Bellonci inaugurates, in Italy, what will later become a happy tradition: giving space and voice to those who have had their space and voice taken away.

It is a tradition that is still surprisingly difficult to cite in any literature environment worth noting despite its successful following.