Alba de Céspedes y Bertini

Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (11 March 1911 – 14 November 1997) was a Cuban-Italian writer.

Alba de Céspedes y Bertini
Born(1911-03-11)11 March 1911
Rome, Italy
Died14 November 1997(1997-11-14) (aged 86)
Paris, France

Family

De Céspedes was the daughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (a Cuban ambassador to Italy)[1] and his Italian wife, Laura Bertini y Alessandri. Her grandfather was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who is the father of the nation of Cuba,[1] and a distant cousin was Perucho Figueredo. She was married to Francesco Bounous of the Italian foreign service.

Her work

De Céspedes worked as a journalist in the 1930s for Piccolo, Epoca, and La Stampa. In 1935, she wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri. Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II.[2] In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity.[1] In her work, there is a recurring motif of women judging the rightness or wrongness of their actions.[1] In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels were also banned (Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940)). In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda.[1] From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an agony column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca.[3] She wrote the screenplay for the Michelangelo Antonioni 1955 film Le Amiche. Her work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.[4]

After the war she went to live in Paris. Although her books were bestsellers, De Céspedes has been overlooked in recent studies of Italian women writers.[1]

Select bibliography
  • L’Anima Degli Altri (1935)
  • Prigionie (1936)
  • Io, Suo Padre (1936)
  • Concerto (1937)
  • Nessuno Torna Indietro (There's No Turning Back)(1938)
  • La Fuga (1940)
  • Il Libro del Forestiero (1946)
  • Dalla Parte Di Lei (The Best of Husbands) (1949)
  • Quaderno Proibito (The Secret – translated by Isabel Quigly) (1952).
  • Gli Affetti Di Famiglia (1952)
  • Tra Donne De Sole (1955)
  • Invito A Pranzo (1955)
  • Prima E Dopo (Between Then and Now) (1956)
  • Il Rimorso (1967)
  • La Bambalona (1967)
  • Chansons des filles de mai (1968)
  • Sans Autre Lieu Que La Nuit (1973)
  • Nel Buio Della Notte (1976)

Visit to Cuba

De Céspedes in October 1968 attended the centennial of Cuba's struggle for independence celebrations. One of the events, attended by Fidel Castro, was held in Manzanillo, Cuba, where her grandfather, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, on 10 October 1868, had made a speech against Spain which started the Ten Years' War. She also during that trip donated to the Cuban National Archives letters written by her grandfather between 1871 and 1874 to his wife.

References
  1. Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
  2. Ellen Nerenberg (1994). Rinaldina Russell (ed.). Italian women writers: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0313283475.
  3. Penny Morris (2004). "From private to public: Alba de Céspedes' agony column in 1950s Italy". Modern Italy. 9 (1): 11–20. doi:10.1080/13532940410001677467.
  4. "Alba De Céspedes". Olympedia. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
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