Sibilla Aleramo

Sibilla Aleramo, born Marta Felicina Faccio, was an Italian writer, journalist and feminist, born in Alessandria in 1876 and died in Rome in 1960. Her work, largely autobiographical, portrays the situation of women in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, and remains a landmark of Italian literature.

She grew up in Milan and at eleven moved with her family to the Marche region, where her father managed a glass factory. Unable to continue her schooling beyond primary level, she kept studying on her own. As a teenager she was raped by a factory employee, Ulderico Pierangeli, and, under the legal customs of the time, was pressed into marrying him. Her only son, Walter, was born when she was seventeen. Around 1901 she left her family for Rome, where she fought unsuccessfully for custody of the boy.

In Rome she was involved with the writer Giovanni Cena, who encouraged her to turn her experiences into fiction. The result was Una donna (1906), the story of a woman who leaves her husband, which became an immediate success and an early landmark of Italian feminism. Aleramo took part in the feminist movement and helped set up night schools for women and for peasants in the Agro Romano. From 1908 she had a relationship with Cordula Poletti, later told in Il passaggio.

Her political path was ambiguous. She signed the 1925 anti-fascist manifesto, but in the 1930s she approached Mussolini's regime, seeking financial support and writing favourable reviews. After the Second World War she joined the Communist Party and attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wrocław in 1948. She said she had lived three lives: as a wife and mother, as an activist, and as a writer.

Her legacy rests above all on Una donna, considered a classic and the first openly feminist novel by an Italian author. Her letters to Poletti have been studied in recent decades for their frankness about relationships between women.