Born in Rome on June 13th, Anna Maria came from a large, poor family that moved frequently before settling in Naples in 1928. Almost self-taught, with only elementary school and a year of commercial studies behind her, she was interested in drawing and playing piano before discovering her passion for literature and her calling to be a writer. Her lack of formal education highlights the stylistic perfection of her work, which continues to fascinate her readers.

In 1933, Anna Maria's brother Manuele, a sailor, died off the coast of Martinique, and the memory of this tragedy, filled with regret, deeply influenced her entire work. That same year she made her literary debut with three poems published in «La Fiera Letteraria», including one titled Manuele: «(...)All/ that remains of you, Manuele, is a name alone; and within my chest, a pain/ that blends with this name» (La Luna che trascorre, Empiria).1

Another brother, Antonio, also a sailor, soon died off the coast of Albania. After the passing of both parents in 1952, the author and her sister, Maria, were left as the only surviving members of their family. They would remain inseparable for the rest of their lives.

Between 1945 and 1950, Anna Maria started collaborating with «Sud» magazine while moving from city to city looking for a job, almost always with her sister Maria. Their close relationship, while being vital to Anna Maria’s life, also caused her everlasting guilt, as Maria sacrificed her own life to stay with her. Maria never married to stay by her sister’s side, and her job in a post office, and later her pension, were almost the sole sources of income for both of them, as the earnings from Ortese's publications were always modest. Maria, as well as the rest of the family, would turn into ethereal, timeless characters in Anna Maria’s stories, like Juana in Il Porto di Toledo. Anna Maria herself might have identified with the iguana in the eponymous novel, a small creature on a lost island who dresses and speaks like a woman. She serves a family of impoverished Spanish nobles and falls in love with a Milanese nobleman who wants to turn the island into a paradise for the wealthy. The iguana soon realizes how cruel the human world can be. The iguana and other natural beings in Ortese’s work always have "human" traits (the goldfinch in Il Cardillo Addolorato or the puma in Alonso e i visionari), while people are portrayed as both angelic and brutal (the monk, the people she met in Silenzio a Milano or in her journalistic reports for «La Lente Oscura»).

Between one city and the next, Ortese began publishing works that never achieved significant commercial success, only garnering a few «echoes of controversy», as she would later recall in her final testamentary work, Corpo Celeste, which condenses her thoughts and life with clarity: «[…] And I think I am not a true writer if, until now, I have not been able to even remotely express the kind of economic terror—and therefore the impossibility of writing—that a writer in Italy experiences if they refuse to take Orders. And one who, from birth, had nothing of their own, not even a roof».2 Despite her limited public success and the lack of critical attention, she did find supporters in the literary world, notably Pietro Citati, who called her "the dreaming gypsy", capturing the very essence of Ortese: «Although my life is not what one would call a fulfilled life, I must consider myself lucky because, over at least fifty years of adult life, I managed a few times to approach this bright shore—I, who consider myself an eternal shipwrecked soul—of expression or expressiveness that aimed at this eternal interest: to capture and fix…the marvellous phenomenon of living and feeling […] This sentiment can best be described by the words: ecstasy, ecstatic, fleeting, inscrutable.» (Corpo Celeste).3 What Ortese describes is the experience where it is impossible to separate reality from dreams. «[…] this, woman, is the world: a thing made of wind and voices—made of expectations and regret for apparitions, made of things that are not the world» (In Sonno e In Veglia).4

It is the constant "strangeness" that evokes the experience of life itself, which for Ortese is never centred on the self, but always "cosmic", a living connection between all beings, where even stones are included (and thus the earth and its inhabitants as "celestial bodies", always intertwined with the universe). Writing can only capture and reflect this relationship by following its natural flow, and working in harmony with life and nature, through similarities, shifts, and metaphors.

«I could start over, if I wanted to, even adding many other things that I have missed. But everything that has passed before my eyes over all these years, already unfolds in a single, uniform tone, a single shade of blue, where this or that detail no longer matters more than a vague curling of foam or the glimmer of silver specks. The sea! That’s what life is when the years begin to race between us and the distant shore where we first appeared: a sleepy, remote, murmuring sea» (Il Porto di Toledo).5 The sea and its movement, which evokes Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness and Proust's intermittent heartbeats, will play a central role in Ortese’s work, undoubtedly influenced by the death of her brothers and her identification as a "shipwrecked soul", or because of the coastal cities she chose to live in. The sea also serves as a metaphor of Time, "inscrutable" and simultaneously surface and substance, always the same yet always different. Furthermore, it reflects the nature of her writing process, where thoughts, memories, and perceptions operate in continuous motion; shaping, adding, and smoothing the sentence, both in structure and substance, until they form a remarkable unity where it seems impossible to distinguish the individual elements.

Ortese gained some notoriety in 1953 with Il Mare Non Bagna Napoli, though it sparked controversy due to her criticisms of Neapolitan intellectuals associated with the magazine «Sud». The writer never abandoned her critical stance toward the literary world, from which she felt unfairly excluded and despite feeling like she truly belonged to it. Throughout her life, her desire to be recognized as a "writer" and a "storyteller" remained a sore point, as revealed in her letters and rare interviews. Through the intense correspondence between Ortese and her friends, such as Citati and Dario Bellezza, intimate moments and anecdotes emerge, some of which can be found in Ortese’s work. Bellezza would discreetly talk about her love for Marcello Venturi, a “romantic disappointment", as Ortese herself told him (this made her look "monastic" and "senile" to the eyes of the poet during their first meeting, although she wasn’t like that). In 1986, Bellezza helped garner support from friends and fellow intellectuals for Ortese to receive the Bacchelli Law pension, after she confessed in a letter to him that she had been evicted from her home in Rapallo, her final port. Bellezza made this public and started a petition. It was only in 1993, at the age of 79, that Ortese experienced a wider public success with Il Cardillo Addolorato, published by Adelphi, a publisher that had begun reprinting all her works in 1986 (in collaboration with the author herself), creating a revised and cohesive body of work. Ortese passed away on March 9, 1998, three years after her sister Maria.


Translated by Viola Motti.
1 «(...)Tutto/ che ci rimane ormai di te, Manuele, è un nome solo; e dentro al petto un male/ che a questo nome si confonde», translation by Viola Motti

2 Translation by Viola Motti

3 Translation by Viola Motti

4 Translation by Viola Motti

5 Translation by Viola Motti