Alba de Céspedes y Bertini

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

Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (March 11, 1911 in Rome, Italy – November 14, 1997 in Paris, France) was a Cuban-Italian writer.

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,[2] 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.[3] In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity.[4] In her work, there is a recurring motif of women judging the rightness or wrongness of their actions.[5] 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.[6] From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an agony column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca.[7] She wrote the screenplay for the Michelangelo Antonioni 1955 film Le Amiche.

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.[8]

Select bibliography

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 October 10, 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. ↑ Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
  3. ↑ Ellen Nerenberg (1994). Rinaldina Russell, ed. Italian women writers: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313283478.
  4. ↑ Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
  5. ↑ Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
  6. ↑ Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
  7. ↑ 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. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  8. ↑ Nerenberg, Ellen. "Alba De Céspedes." Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. By Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. 104-110. Print.
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