Alba Carla Laurita de Céspedes y Bertini, an eclectic figure, emerged as a writer, poet, screenwriter, playwright, radio reporter, journalist, and public intellectual. Daughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada, the Cuban ambassador to Italy (who also served briefly as President of the Republic of Havana in 1933), and Laura Bertini Alessandrini, she was born on March 11 in Rome but always considered Cuba her true homeland. Her grandfather had been the first president of Cuba in 1868, after liberating the country from Spanish rule, only to be assassinated in 1874. Alba spent her childhood and adolescence between Rome and Paris, often staying with relatives due to her parents' frequent absences. At fifteen, she married Count Giuseppe Antamoro and had her only son, Franco, in 1928. However, she separated from her husband shortly after. At twenty-three, she published her first short story in the magazine “Giornale d’Italia”, which gained attention in journalistic circles and led to collaborations with several newspapers, including “Il Piccolo”, “Il Mattino”, and “Il Messaggero”. The following year, in 1935, she published her first collection of short stories, L'anima degli altri.
Her first novel, Nessuno torna indietro (which was later turned into a great film by Alessandro Blasetti in 1943 and a TV adaptation directed by Franco Giraldi in 1987), was published by Mondadori in 1938. The publisher had to make considerable efforts to prevent the fascist regime from censoring the book, which quickly became an international bestseller. The novel received remarkable critical and public acclaim and even won the Viareggio Prize, shared with Vincenzo Cardarelli. However, this victory was revoked within hours for political reasons. Set in fascist Italy, the novel tells the story of eight girls, different from one another in social background, geographical origin and attitude, but all linked by their experience in an elegant boarding house for university students. De Céspedes "dared" to give voice to a free, self-aware femininity, eager to redefine its own existence and rejecting the notion of "angel in the house". 1 In 1939, after her father fell ill -and later died- alba traveled to Cuba (described as an "immense green raft"), a place she had visited only once before, at age nine, during a stay with her parents. She would come back to Cuba in 1948 and frequently in the early 1950s to care for her mother, who had fallen into madness after the loss of her husband, until her death in 1955.
When the armistice was announced, Alba was in Rome and decided to leave for the liberated areas in the south. However, along with her partner, diplomat Franco Bounous, whom she would later marry, she was forced to seek shelter in Abruzzo before finally reaching Naples and then Bari. Among the documents from these years are her diary entries and reports for Radio Bari, the first free radio station in Italy after the September 8 armistice. The station broadcasted updates on the Kingdom of the South and resistance movements against Nazi-fascism. On the “Italia Combatte” program, which featured figures like Arnoldo Foà, Ubaldo Lay, and Pio Ambrogetti, Alba de Céspedes used the pseudonym Clorinda to share her experience crossing enemy lines and encourage women to engage in a "silent and deaf resistance", offering guidance on the “sabotage”. In September 1944, back in Rome right after the city had been liberated from nazi armies, she founded “Mercurio”, a cultural magazine that merged political passion with literary interest which operated until 1948. The magazine attracted prominent contributors, including Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Sibilla Aleramo, Paola Masino, Natalia Ginzburg, Mario Luzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Renato Guttuso, Giorgio Morandi, and Toti Scialoja. After the magazine shut down in late 1948, Alba began writing for “Epoca”, a magazine directed by Enzo Biagi, where she wrote a column titled Dalla parte di lei, which would later inspire the title of her 1949 novel. With the historical background of World War II, the anti-fascist struggle and the Resistance, while also portraying the protagonist’s emotional journey, the book is about a great love and a murder. The story follows Alessandra, who shoots her husband Francesco, a university professor and anti-fascist, symbolically firing also against the betrayal of the hopes of all women who, during the war, had truly believed that things would change, only to face the disappointment of unattended promises.
The man that my protagonist kills could have been judged by strangers as a perfect husband, but with his indifference, his failure to understand her feelings, moods, and aspirations […] he killed her day by day, destroying her dearest hopes and highest ideals, thus committing, unpunished and even protected by the law, a slow moral crime.2
Three years later, in Quaderno Proibito, written as a diary, Valeria – dissatisfied with her life as a wife and mother, in a family where she is recognized as an auxiliary figure, subordinated to her husband and children’s needs – tries to reassess her life. She becomes aware of the compromises that have shaped her persona over the course of time: a mother and wife; ultimately concluding that there is no way to break free from the traditional roles imposed by society.
These years saw Alba travelling to and fro Italy, Havana, and the United States, where her husband had been appointed First Secretary at the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C. She started writing for American newspapers and kept up a dense correspondence with the Italian intellectual community. In 1963, she published Il rimorso, which she considered her best novel. The book addresses the crisis of values that had defined the antifascist era, at the point when it became clear that the world that had emerged "did not resemble our hopes". Like her previous works, it adopts a narrative style – in this case, letters, in other works diaries or memoirs – which belongs to the "writing of the private" tradition, typically associated with women, and featuring a first-person narrator. This was followed by the publication of the novel La Bambolona.
In the 1960s, she moved to Paris, where she began working on Sans autre lieu que la nuit in French. However, the project was interrupted when she focused on creating a collection titled Chansons des filles de mai, which included twenty poems inspired by the 1968 student protests uprising in Paris. The novel was later completed and published in 1973 by Seul publishing house. In 1976, she translated it herself into Italian, releasing it under the title Nel buio della notte with Mondadori. During this period, she also wrote for cinema and television, worked as an editorial consultant, and began drafting a historical novel deeply intertwined with her own life story. The title, Con gran amor, was inspired by Fidel Castro. This work involved a vast archive of materials gathered between 1939 and 1967, which she continued to revise until her death. The novel intertwined personal family history with the story of a nation, including the independence war led by her grandfather and the revolution led by Castro.
Alba passed away in Paris in 1997 at age eighty-six, just eight days after donating all her personal papers and documents to Archivi Riuniti delle Donne, at the time based in Milan, in the house of the centenarian Unione Femminile Nazionale. The archive was directed by Annarita Buttafuoco and Marina Zancan. This remarkable collection of materials, neatly organized into folders, spanned her life and began even before her birth. This is even more noteworthy if we consider that women's archives are usually scarce, as many women don't consider their lives worthy of preservation or expect anyone to be interested in them after their death. When she passed, Alba had not finished her final work yet. Con gran amor was completed by Mondadori and included in a volume collecting all her novels and released within the “Meridiani” collection in 2011, the centenary of her birth.
Translated by Viola Motti.
1 "Angelo del focolare" in Italian, meaning a woman who only devotes herself to her family and house chores. In english it refers to victorian ideals (see The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore, 1854).
2 Translation by Viola Motti