Nella Nobili

Nella Nobili (1926–1985) was an Italian poet and writer. She is considered a representative of proletarian literature. first in a ceramics workshop, then at fourteen as a glassblower. It was as a self-taught person that she began to develop a link with writing and poetry. During breaks after work, she wrote her first texts and avidly read everything she could find: Italian poetry, but also Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson.

She frequented the house of Renata Viganò and in Via Mascarella, where intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sibilla Aleramo, former partisans and students met. Nella Nobili published poems related to the world of the factory (La jeune fille à l'usine, 1978), which earned her recognition as a representative of proletarian literature. But in Rome, she felt that she was being “paraded around like a little monster dressed as a worker-poet” and, disenchanted, she left for France.

Nobili arrived in Paris in 1953, where she remained for the rest of her life. There she made handicrafts with miniature works of art using the self-invented cold-casting method. She published in magazines such as Sorcières and corresponded with figures such as Giorgio Morandi, Michel Ragon, Bernard Noël, Claire Etcherelli and Henri Thomas.

She committed suicide at the age of 59, in 1985, in Cachan.

Works I quaderni della fabbrica (The factory's notebooks), 1948.

Legacy Her works have been partly translated by Marie-José Tramuta, professor at the University of Caen Normandy.

In September 2018, her compositions were read and performed by Drusilla Foer as part of Il Tempo delle Donne, the event organised by Corriere della Sera at the Milan Triennale.