Maria Antonietta Torriani

Maria Antonietta Torriani (1 January 1840 – 24 March 1920) was an Italian journalist and fiction writer. Much of her work was published under the pen name Marchesa Colombi, a character in the comedy La satira e Parini by Paolo Ferrari. A year after her birth, her father died at the age of 32. She had an older sister, Giuseppina, and a younger half-brother, Tommaso. She attended the primary school where her mother taught, and spent four years at the Bellini Institute of Arts and Crafts, where she excelled academically. She earned her teaching diploma studying at a convent in the Lake Orta region.

Career

While at the convent, she began corresponding with the journalist Eugenio Torelli Viollier, who went on to found the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's oldest newspapers. In 1865, her stepfather died, leaving her a fortune, and soon afterwards she bought a home in Milan. There she became friends with the feminist leader Anna Maria Mozzoni. The two women organised a series of conferences in 1871, lecturing in Genoa, Florence, and Bologna. In Bologna she befriended writers Enrico Panzacchi and Giosuè Carducci. A reviewer in Italian Americana called it a "short masterpiece", and another in Kirkus Reviews called it "a trailblazing work, in its way, and a most welcome rediscovery".