Goliarda Sapienza

Goliarda Sapienza (; 10 May 1924 – 30 August 1996) was an Italian actress and writer. She is best known for her 1998 novel The Art of Joy.

Life Early life Sapienza was born on 10 May 1924 in Catania, Sicily, to (1880–1953) and (1880–1949). Giudice, a prominent journalist originally from Lombardy, was a feminist activist as well as a prominent member of the Italian Socialist Party who had been repeatedly imprisoned for her beliefs. Giudice collaborated with national and international left-wing intellectuals, including Angelica Balabanoff, Antonio Gramsci, Lenin, and Umberto Terracini. She had many step-siblings from her parents’ previous families who lived together in the same house in Via Pistone, Catania. Giudice was at one time the manager of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci at the newspaper Grido del Popolo; Gramsci had acted as a babysitter to Sapienza's older siblings.

Sapienza spent her childhood in a non-conformist feminist anti-fascist and anti-clerical environment, where she was exposed to a mix of different class backgrounds and to active political involvement. Since her father did not want her to be indoctrinated by the fascist propaganda of the Mussolini regime she was removed from the formal school system when she was 14 and home-schooled. In 1964 she made a second suicide attempt. by publishers because of its length (over 700 pages) and its portrayal of a woman unrestrained by conventional morality and traditional feminine roles. It detailed a woman's pursuit of cultural, financial and sexual independence in early 20th-century Sicily, during which she sleeps with both men and women, commits incest and murders a nun. She was unable to find a publisher for it during her lifetime. One rejected it as "a pile of iniquity".

In 1979 she married the writer and actor Angelo Pellegrino (born 1946), who was 22 years her junior, an act that was regarded as scandalous. in Rebibbia prison.

Posthumous success In 1998, her husband Angelo Pellegrino financed the full publication of 1,000 copies of L'arte della gioia by Stampa Alternativa.

A few years later he sent some copies to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the novel was noticed by a German editor, who believed it to be a forgotten masterpiece and arranged for it to be published in Germany. The success of its French, German and Spanish editions earned Sapienza comparisons to D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal. two collections of poems, Siciliane (which is in Sicilian dialect) and Ancestrale; the short story Elogio del bar; a selection of thoughts taken from the writer's diaries, collected in the volumes Il vizio di parlare a me stessa and La mia parte di gioia; a collection of plays and cinema subjects, Tre pièces e soggetti cinematografici; and lastly the novel Appuntamento a Positano.

Memorials In October 2020, the Goliarda Sapienza Women's Library in the La Montagnola district of Rome was dedicated to her. Streets and squares in her birthplace of Catania as well as in Palermo, Gaeta and Linguaglossa have been named after her.

Filmography Un giorno nella vita (1946) Fabiola (1949) Persiane chiuse (1950) Directed by Luigi Comencini. Behind Closed Shutters 1951) Altri tempi (1952) La voce del silenzio (1953). Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Senso (1954) Ulysses (1955) Abandoned (1955) Lettera aperta a un giornale della sera (1970) Dialogo di Roma (1983)

She also dubbed: Elena Varzi in It's Forever Springtime (1950) Caterina Rigoglioso in Love in the City (1953) Virna Lisi in The Doll That Took the Town (1953)