Anita Pittoni

Anita Tosoni Pittoni (May 6, 1901 – May 8, 1982) was an Italian textile craftswoman, clothing designer, writer, and publisher. During the 1930s she ran a business in Trieste employing around 90 women who produced clothing from her designs. Forced to give up this work during World War II, in 1949 she established the Lo Zibaldone publishing house in Trieste.

Early life Pittoni was born, initially with Austrian nationality, on 6 May 1901 in Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Angelina Marcolin, a housewife who supplemented the family income by working as a clothes maker and embroiderer, and Francesco Pittoni, an engineer who worked in Trieste's Municipal Technical Office. The eldest of four siblings, she was the niece of Valentino Pittoni, a noted socialist politician who represented Trieste on the Imperial Council in Vienna and through whom she met most of the leading socialists in Trieste. After attending the Trieste Girls' High School, she did not pursue university studies due to her family's poor financial situation following her father's death. In the late 1920s, she began frequenting the photography studio of Wanda Wulz and her sister Marion, where she first revealed her artistic talent. Through another uncle, Silvio Tosoni Pittoni, she also began to establish contact with the intellectual elite of Trieste of the time.

Artistic career During a trip to Vienna in 1928 she decided to devote herself to textile craftsmanship. She then chose to leave her family to live with her partner, Giovanni Parovel, who had left his wife and young daughter to be with her, and to open a workshop on the premises of the Wulz sisters. At the time she was reported as saying that "I don’t have half a lira in my pocket because all my capital, 70 lire, I’ve spent: 35 lire on polenta flour and eggs, and 35 lire on wool. Nor do I know who will buy my sweater or when it will happen." In producing her early clothes for sale, she was helped by her mother, who would remain closely associated with Pittoni's business until World War II.

Publishing In 1949, Pittoni opened the publishing house Lo Zibaldone, with support from writers from Trieste, including Giani Stuparich with whom she had become romantically attached in the 1940s, Virgilio Giotti, Umberto Saba, Italo Svevo , and Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini. The house's title probably derived from Zibaldone di pensieri, a work by the Italian writer, Giacomo Leopardi. She published work by her sponsors as well as books by other authors who had some connection with the city of Trieste, as well as translated works, with people from the Trieste area being responsible for the translations. A feature of the books she published was the considerable attention paid to their design and aesthetics.

Among the works published were some of her own. Although having started writing in the 1930s, she did not begin to publish until 1936 when two of her short stories appeared in the Venetian weekly Domani. She then contributed to various newspapers, such as La Fiera Letteraria, Il Piccolo, Il Gazzettino, and La Nazione. Her own works that she published included Le stagioni (The Seasons), a collection of prose poems containing her introspective and intimate reflections; Il Passeto (The Passage), a prose poem composed in the Trieste dialect, based on her family memories, particularly of her father; and La Casa Mia (My House), as well as the short story Passeggiata Armata (Armed Walk). Pittoni also inaugurated a literary salon at her home, which was attended by members of the Trieste intellectual class and others who occasionally visited the city. After the death of Stuparich, Pittoni dedicated the Centro di Studi Triestini, which she had founded, to him. This houses archives and historical and bibliographical sources, which provide a theoretical perspective of her work. Financial difficulties forced her to interrupt her publishing activity in 1971, but she continued to write for Il Piccolo.

Death and legacy Pittoni died at the La Maddalena hospital in Trieste on 8 May 1982.

Her diary from 1944 and 1945 was discovered by a bookseller from Trieste and published in 2020.