No woman is an island

Night after night, Piazza Castello hosts some of Festivaletteratura's most prominent guests. Tucked away behind Piazza Sordello and hidden inside Palazzo Ducale, this scenic paved courtyard has welcomed thousands of readers and acclaimed authors over thirty years of festival history. Among them are Bianca Pitzorno, Maria Attanasio, and Melania G. Mazzucco, three of the finest voices in contemporary Italian literature.

The first two share several similarities: both born during World War II, both islanders, both engaged individuals who produce (seemingly) unengaged literature. Pitzorno is one of Italy's most beloved authors, an 84-year old woman who created some of the wittiest children's books. She was born in Sardinia and moved to Milan, where a RAI executive (for whom she worked) suggested she tried writing children’s books. And so she did until the 2000s. “I knew a lot of young people, they told me everything, I understood them and therefore I could write about them. Then they grew up, I grew old and I didn’t understand them anymore. Those children were now women, with different problems and I cared about them, I wanted to tell their stories.”

Attanasio was born in 1943 in Caltagirone, Sicily, and never left. She has been a teacher, a political activist, but above all a powerful storyteller. She started writing poetry as a teenager but turned to fiction when publisher Elvira Sellerio urged her to write down the tales she told. “Stories come to me, not the other way around. I write of real people, mostly women, who did not have the voice to tell their stories - so they borrowed mine”.

With tales of their families, of their islands, of the past and the present, the two women keep the audience captivated. They delve into their most recent novels, which both employ external archival traces as literary devices. Pitzorno's La sonnambula opens with an old Sardinian newspaper advertisement for a medium, while Attanasio's La rosa inversa stems from an 18th-century pamphlet documenting a crime, that of a gentleman who returns from a trip, can't find his lover, and ends up killing a Dominican preacher in a church. With their origins in Sardinian and Sicilian history, these narratives bridge real events and historical rumors. However, though shaped by their native islands, their books speak to everybody. By giving voice to forgotten women and connecting individual lives to universal human truths, Pitzorno and Attanasio prove that no woman — and no story — is an island.