L’AMICA GENIALE

Abstract

The recent discovery of additional letters directed by Anna Maria Ortese to Marta Maria (called Mattia) Pezzoli, former owner of the successful epistolary published in 2023 under the title Vera gioia è vestita di dolore. Lettere a Mattia, was given as an opportunity for a reflection on the theme of friendship as friendship of and between women, long banished from our cultural history and whose history remains yet to be written. In fact, the letters in question exemplarily document the power and resources of this kind of relationship, which, when it is firm and deep, not only shows itself as what is excellent in human existence, and therefore in the private lives of the subjects involved, but also functions as the axis of rotation of the world that from old becomes new, and revises and refunds its own balance. Since it is a relationship that contradicts the male's claim to be “the signifier and the signified of all [feminine] desire”, as Luce Irigaray wrote in This Sex that is Not a Sex, and in so doing subverts existing power arrangements.