LA QUÊTE D’UN DÉSIR INASSOUVI

Abstract

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.