https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/issue/feed 2026-10-11T08:02:04+02:00 Anita Virga Anita.Virga@wits.ac.za Open Journal Systems <p>Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe / Italian Studies in Southern Africa (ISSA) is published bi-annually and aims at providing a forum for academic discussion on all aspects of Italian culture. The journal features articles on the Italian language and literature and, since it is one of the primary aims of the journal to foster multi- and inter-disciplinary study and communication, contributions are invited from all writers interested in Italian culture, irrespective of their specific disciplines. Contributions of a less theoretical nature which provide an insight into Italian culture, especially as it manifests itself in Southern Africa, will also receive attention.</p> <p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license"><img style="border-width: 0;" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License"></a><br>This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p> https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/380 2026-10-09T22:17:37+02:00 Anita Virga anita.virga@wits.ac.za 2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/367 2026-09-25T08:41:21+02:00 Patrick Mégevand anita.virga@wits.ac.za

This personal testimony retraces Patrick Mégevand’s encounter with Anna Maria Ortese and the twenty-year friendship that developed through an intense correspondence and regular meetings in Rapallo. Beginning with the discovery of Ortese’s work in 1978, the essay reconstructs the intellectual and human relationship that led to the preservation of 117 letters and postcards, partly published in Pensare l’alba al fondo di una notte d’inverno (2017). Focusing on the recurring them e of the house (casa), Mégevand examines how Ortese’s letters reveal the material hardships, anxieties, and loneliness that marked her last decades. More than a physical space, the home emerges as a place of writing, memory, and creation. Far from functioning merely as autobiographical documents, the letters fostered a relationship of trust and friendship, illustrating how epistolary writing became for Ortese a privileged space of intimacy, dialogue, and resistance to solitude.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/368 2026-09-25T08:49:17+02:00 Barbara Cavallini anita.virga@wits.ac.za

Anna Maria Ortese and the painter Flavia Arlotta exchanged a long and intense correspondence from the autumn of 1961 until a year before the writer’s death, revealing a fraternal friendship and a close bond, dictated by common interests and passions. The letters, preserved in the Giovanni Colacicchi and Flavia Arlotta Fund at the “Archivio contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’ Gabinetto Vieusseux di Firenze” and donated by Arlotta herself, constitute a valuable source for a thorough analysis of Ortese’s literary and critical activity between the 1960s and the 1990s. The present study focuses on the early period of their correspondence and on Ortese’s interest in civil rights issues, which unveils between the lines of the rich epistolary writing.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/369 2026-09-25T08:55:55+02:00 Alessandra Trevisan anita.virga@wits.ac.za

The 1980s marked a complex period for Anna Maria Ortese. Following *Il cappello piumato* (1979), feeling marginalised, she struggled to secure a stable publishing arrangement, working with several smaller presses, such as Pellicanolibri, before her eventual arrival at Adelphi. This period reveals a network of significant yet underexplored friendships, such as those with poets Dario Bellezza, Beppe Costa, and with Adele Cambria, who supported her during her struggle for the Bacchelli law. Correspondence and unpublished materials illuminate these dynamics and missed opportunities, suggesting how the author’s elusiveness influenced her path. This paper therefore interrogates the editorial and critical dimension and publishing trajectory of Ortese’s work during this crucial decade.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/376 2026-10-09T21:54:05+02:00 Lilia Bellucci anita.virga@wits.ac.za

The marginal position long reserved for Anna Maria Ortese, along with the dispersion of her documents, has limited the understanding of her originality in the literary and cultural history not only of Italy. The study of her correspondence with Adriana Capocci Belmonte offers significant new research directions today. This corpus of documents spans from 1938 to 1944, the years following the publication of Angelici dolori. Only the letters from Anna Maria Ortese have survived, while those from Adriana are lost. Despite its gaps, the correspondence contributes to understanding the personality, relationships, and experiences of the writer. Thus, new and decisive research paths are opened, revealing the influence that the thought of the poet and philosopher Tagore exerted on Anna Maria Ortese from the 1930s onwards. This influence came through her acquaintance with a passionate orientalist and her circle of intellectual friends, anticipating the widespread interest in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. There are strong correspondences between Ortese’s poetics and Indian thought, and in the correspondence, one finds not only lexical and conceptual references but also explicit mentions of Tagore and his correlation with a particular short story.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/377 2026-10-09T21:59:51+02:00 Cristina Vignali anita.virga@wits.ac.za

In 1969, Guido Almansi invited Anna M aria Ortese to contribute to a special issue of 20th Century Studies devoted to the representation of sexuality in the modern novel. While many prominent European and American writers accepted the invitation, Ortese replied with a brief but remarkable letter refusing to participate. This paper examines that unpublished exchange and situates it within Ortese’s literary poetics. Rejecting sexuality as a privileged literary “topic”, Ortese argues that writing is not about choosing subjects but about “unconsciously seeking the relations between things”. Through a reading of her response alongside Poveri e semplici (1967), the paper show erotic experience in Ortese’s work is displaced from bodily representation toward affective, ethical, and symbolic relationships. Far from celebrating the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, Ortese proposes a radically different understanding of literature, one grounded in invisible connections rather than thematic categories. Her letter thus offers a rare and concise statement of a poetics that resists both critical classifications and contemporary cultural fashions.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/378 2026-10-09T22:06:40+02:00 Elisa Attanasio anita.virga@wits.ac.za

This essay examines the figure of the “doll’s house” as a critical construct in modern literature, through the works of Henrik Ibsen, Katherine Mansfield, and Anna Maria Ortese. From Nora’s act of rupture in Ibsen, to Mansfield’s subtle subversion of social hierarchies through the child’s gaze, and Ortese’s post-catastrophic reimagining of the domestic sphere, the doll’s house emerges as a shifting site of imaginative resistance. The analysis traces a trajectory linking these texts through the concepts of emancipation, fem ale solidarity, and insubordination, arguing that domestic space operates not as a neutral setting but as a contested threshold of meaning. The essay concludes by reframing the house as a precarious yet vital locus of shared imagination, shaped by fem ale literary and affective alliances, particularly in the epistolary dialogue between Ortese and her friend Mattia.

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/379 2026-10-09T22:11:22+02:00 Alessandro Ferraro anita.virga@wits.ac.za

Anna Maria Ortese made several stops in Genoa through her novels, from L’iguana to Alonso e i visionari, but a city so truthful and at the same time illusory could be seen even more clearly and even earlier in her journalistic and epistolary writing. This essay focuses on the period between 1957 and 1964, on a travel reportage, two letters and an article, in order to highlight Genoa among Ortese’s cities and to include Ortese among the writers of literary Genoa, without overlooking the biographical dimension: she felt she was born in the wrong place and was searching for a safe haven. Maybe it was Genoa?

2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/362 2026-08-15T11:14:46+02:00 Anita Virga anita.virga@wits.ac.za 2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa https://italianstudiesinsa.org/ojs/index.php/issa/article/view/363 2026-08-15T11:28:43+02:00 Cristina Vignali anita.virga@wits.ac.za 2026-10-11T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2026 Italian Studies in South Africa