One of the most significant and influential figures in Italian feminism, and the author of foundational theoretical works such as L’infamia originaria (The Original Infamy), Lea Melandri combines her complex intellectual profile with a warm charisma, a captivating voice reminiscent of a mondina1 (whose protest songs she knows by heart), and a head of rebellious red hair that, along with her deep blue eyes, make her a remarkably beautiful woman.

Lea (Maddalena) Melandri was born in Fusignano, a small town in the Romagna countryside, into a sharecropping family. As was common at the time, the household included uncles, grandparents, and cousins, all living together in poverty, sharing a few rooms in a farmhouse without heating or indoor plumbing.
Lea was an only child, and she showed a strong personality and sharp intelligence from an early age, which allowed her to pursue an exceptional educational path considering her background.

Her parents’ sacrifices allowed her to attend the liceo classico in Lugo (near Ravenna), riding her bike for eight kilometres to and from school every day—an experience that she would never forget. Graduating with top marks, she earned a place at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore2 in Pisa, a leading university that has shaped much of Italy’s postwar intellectual and political elite. However, after completing the first two years, Melandri realised that the Normale wasn’t right for her. She returned to her hometown, and began teaching as a substitute at the same school she had just graduated from. She replaced her former philosophy teacher, Ernesto Maggioni, a sophisticated and moral thinker who would leave a lasting impact on her development. She later earned a degree in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bologna, with a thesis in modern history, though her true passion was literature, particularly the poetry of Pascoli. Her passion for literature would produce, years later, a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the life and work of Sibilla Aleramo in Melandri’s book Come nasce il sogno d’amore (How the Romantic Dream Is Born3). Her career as a permanent teacher began in 1966 in a scientific secondary school, and life seemed to be heading down a predictable path—until, in a twist worthy of a novel heroine, she suddenly fled to Milan, leaving everything behind: her family, her job, her hometown and, most importantly, a forced marriage that would only be officially annulled many years later. Despite the painful consequences that would strain her relationship with her family for years, this bold choice for freedom proved to be a turning point in her life. Not long after, the events of 1968 erupted. While teaching at a middle school in the outskirts of Milan, Melandri happened almost by chance upon the meetings of the non-authoritarian teachers’ movement, which she immediately joined. Within the same political and cultural environment, she met Elvio Fachinelli, a psychoanalyst and leading figure in non-authoritarian education who would deeply influence her life and politics. Together, they founded the magazine L’erba voglio (1971–1977), which went on to have a significant impact on the Italian education system. During these years, Melandri also became active in Milan’s feminist groups, working to keep a meaningful connection between the two experiences.

Her participation in the non-authoritarian education movement and the women’s movement is reflected in her articles published in the magazine, most of which were later collected in her first book, L’infamia originaria (translated into French and Spanish), widely regarded as a manifesto of Italian feminism. The 1970s—a decade of deep personal and collective change for her as for many other women—would always remain a recurring theme in her theoretical and practical work.

Another crucial experience was her teaching in the “150 hours” classes, a trade union initiative to support the education of workers, as well as others who had not been able to complete middle school. In a working-class neighbourhood in the Northern outskirts of Milan, she taught the first group of women, mostly housewives, who had decided to return to school in order to step outside the narrow space of their homes. This fortunate encounter allowed Melandri to reconnect with familiar figures, women whose life stories resemble those from her own childhood in the countryside, leading her to revisit feminist theory through the lens of their real experiences. This work would have a lasting impact on the women’s movement in Milan as the first example of a “women’s school”—a model soon adopted in many other contexts, including single-topic courses, experimental two-year programs, cooperatives, and culminating in the founding, in 1987, of the Associazione per una Libera Università delle donne4 in Milan.

In 1975, after meeting a feminist group at the University of Cagliari, Melandri discovered the Sardinian town of Carloforte, the location of the first feminist holiday in Italy that summer, which Melandri would attend and return to every year. In 2009, as a tribute to her long-lasting loyalty, the town granted her a honorary citizenship.

In 1986, Melandri left her teaching career for good to devote herself entirely to the women’s movement and her research. This choice would allow her to invest an extraordinary amount of time and energy in feminist associations and to focus more deeply on writing, though it would also mean living in a state of ongoing financial insecurity. During those years, she took part in a wide range of feminist initiatives: from groups aimed at consciousness-raising and at the exploration of the unconscious to the “Sexuality and Writing” group, leading up to the creation and direction of the magazine Lapis. Percorsi della riflessione femminile (Lapis. Paths of female reflection, 1987–1997).

Once the long-past misunderstandings between them had healed, her elderly parents—an inseparable couple and passionate ballroom dancers—continued to support her choices from afar, both emotionally and financially. Their enduring closeness helped Melandri maintain a strong and lasting bond with her hometown.

After her father’s death in 1999, Lea entered a difficult period marked by frequent travel to Romagna to assist her mother. The anxiety and fatigue of this care work during her mother’s final years, marked by loneliness and financial strain, are depicted in her 2006 book La perdita (The Loss5).

Her freelance contributions to newspapers and magazines—ranging from Carnet to Liberazione and Gli Altri—are too many to count, as are the conferences and seminars she has taken part in across Italy. She is currently the president of the Free Women’s University in Milan.

What Melandri calls “experience writing” examines first of all how thought is rooted in the body’s memory and in the deep layers of experience that have unconsciously shaped how we feel and perceive the world. In these remote and often “unnameable” places, each person’s unique story meets human behaviours that seem timeless, unchanging, and universal. Among these, the figures of the masculine and feminine, transformed over time by history, yet still retaining the traces of the original narrative that created their enduring features.

Unlike autobiography, which works with memories, giving them shape within a narrative, the kind of writing that pushes “to the edges of the body,” towards the areas most hidden from consciousness, relies on fragments, flashes of thought, emotions that emerge precisely when meaning starts to break down. This approach seeks to shed light on a level of experience that is usually confined to a supposedly natural”, timeless state.

Franco Rella describes it as the “unpresentable of life”6 (Dall’esilio, Feltrinelli, 2004)—what we might also describe as the “viscera of history.” It is a dimension of human experience that resurfaces today in distorted and simplified forms across entertainment, advertising, populist rhetoric, and racism, yet remains difficult to turn into real cultural reflection or change. This form of writing is not a “genre,” as it might seem, even if it shares features with texts like diaries, letters, and autobiographies. It doesn't rely on specific techniques or follow established codes. At the same time, it moves through all genres, displacing their boundaries, reshaping language, and generating new constellations of meaning.

The roots of this stance, appearing as a way of thinking even before becoming a writing style, can be found both in Melandri’s personal history and in the broader context of the social movements of the 1970s: the anti-authoritarian education movement, the magazine L’erba voglio (1971–1977), and feminism. “By the time I finished high school and university, I had a clear sense that much of my life had remained outside the classroom—left out, or deemed 'off topic,' as some of my writings were often labeled, even though their form was praised. Moving to Milan after my escape from the countryside, just as I was about to take on the role of teacher, I encountered anti-authoritarian approaches and the women’s movement. It was a kind of Copernican revolution. The body, sexuality, family relationships, and emotional life–long considered 'private' matters, intimate, and therefore irrelevant to knowledge, academic discourse, or major political issues—suddenly gained new validation and a place in public reflection. What had once been 'off topic' was now the topic." The most “unpresentable” experiences—unearthed and brought back into words, into the view of an attentive community—took center stage in that form of self-narration known as autocoscienza (consciousness-raising), an unconventional and original political practice of feminism. It was a process of making and unmaking, a re-reading of one’s personal history marked by back-and-forth movements, dreams, and moments of clarity; supported or questioned by the attentive presence of other women, which meant both looking and being looked at, exploring the often unconscious depths of a “representation of the world accepted as a given”7 (Sibilla Aleramo). It was a very particular kind of self-narration, at first accomplished through speaking and only later through writing, once it became clear how much the spoken word could conceal and leave unsaid. Writing became a structure capable of looking behind itself, of exploring its own hidden corners; something that could hold the loneliness of an individual, the narrowness of a room, but also the relationship with others and with the world—a space for both storytelling and reflection.

In the early 1980s, Melandri started expanding and deepening her field of inquiry, coinciding with a long period of psychoanalysis. “To my surprise, I found myself caught up in a style of writing unfamiliar to me, made up of short sentences, fragments with an emotional undertone tied to episodes from my personal life. In that same period—perhaps not by chance—I discovered Sibilla Aleramo, and wrote advice columns and private essays for the weekly magazine Ragazza In (1981-1983) and in Noi Donne (1990-1993). The writings that emerged from the women’s “150 hours” classes, where I had been teaching since 1976, were also very important. At that time, I became more aware of the clear connection between the less regarded “life writing”—letters, diaries, scattered notes—and literary writing; between the sentimentality attributed to women and one of the most enduring myths of men’s thought: the androgynous ideal, the ‘creative mind’ described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.”

“I think it’s important to say that all these writings—from Aleramo to Michelstaedter, Nietzsche, Freud, all featured in my book Come nasce il sogno d’amore—were not approached as objects of study. I engaged with them through what I would call a process of rewriting: tailing the text, tracing it, letting myself be seduced by another’s words, blending or even merging into it, then stepping back just enough to be able to show it, distill it, to reveal its hidden meaning, the unsaid.” Unlike autobiography, which aims to arrange fragments into a coherent whole, the rereading/rewriting process embraces the dispersion of meaning as a way to move closer to a more authentic self-perception. With its practice of collective “self-narration,” 1970s feminism had somehow shattered the mirror in which some women had once hoped to see themselves reflected from every angle. Building a self that was more independent from internalised models required the gaze of other women, and a willingness to explore the deeper layers of one’s own being, recognising the many faces and voices that live within us. A process akin to “drilling” through the outer crust to then carry out what Alberto Asor Rosa called a “mineralogy of thought”: carving underground tunnels, reconnecting hidden paths, and “learning a different language.” This, in many ways, is the aim of “experience writing”: to learn the hybrid language of the inner world, dispel its myths, discourage its silences, uncover its hidden “cultural treasures,” and give a name to “the things we have not yet been able to name.” And there are still many of them.

Translated by Rebecca Cigognini.
1 A mondina (from the Italian verb mondare, meaning “to peel”, “to clean”, “to weed”) is a seasonal rice paddy female worker, especially in Italy’s Po Valley from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th.
2 The Scuola Normale Superiore (commonly known in Italy as the Normale) is a public university in Pisa and Florence, Tuscany.
3 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini
4 There’s no official translation for this association, and it literally means “Association for a Free Women’s University”. It’s the equivalent of International Feminist University Network (IFUN).
5 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini
6 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini
7 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini