Finding Nada

I say that tongue in cheek because the man was a misogynistic stronzo, but he did one thing that helped me put the scraps of my great-great-aunt's life back together. Lucini was a successful poet and polemicist at the turn of the twentieth century. He was also the author of one of the harshest contemporaneous reviews of L'eredità di Saffo I have come across in my research. This thing isn't so much a review of the book as it is a takedown of the author. He calls Nada everythin

The scene was visceral, and more than a little surreal. The murmurs and sighs reverberating across the greenhouse. The nude bodies, covered by thin, translucent veils, entangled in each other’s arms. Heads and hips bobbing in the dim candlelight. The smell of incense. The tiger skin rugs. And the mirrors. Oh my God, the mirrors. But the worst thing was the one lonesome man, watching. Waiting patiently in the wings, hoping for some sloppy seconds. “What did I just read??” I th

Main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC I live really close to the Library of Congress. Since I am now broke and can't afford another trip to Italy before I sell my book, I've been pressing on with my research from afar, even though I roughly have the arc of Nada's life down on metaphorical paper. For a while now, I have been itching to get my hands on a 1907 issue of I Diritti della Scuola, a niche education magazine for schoolteachers that ran in Ital

Il Vate Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863 - 1938) One of the truly great books I had the pleasure of reading as background for Quasi Virile was The Pike: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, by British biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett. While I don't think Nada and Il Vate (The Bard in Italian) were personally acquainted, D'Annunzian sensibilities contextualize just about every business and political choice our heroine made in both the Belle Epoque and the Interwar period. Let me fill you

Garibaldi at Mentana, 1867 Much has been written about the conditions for women in Italy around the time when Nada was born. They could not vote, sign documents, own property, or do much of anything without the consent of their fathers, brothers, guardians, etc... One of the most famous contemporary books on this phenomenon was Sibilla Aleramo's Una Donna. Aleramo, who managed to achieve a certain degree of notoriety in Italian literary and journalistic circles, spent much of

Picenum, Rivista Marchigiana Illustrata, 1916 Cover I’ve spent the last six years of my life hunting for Nada. When my grandmother died, I gave myself permission to try to find her. I loved my grandmother, and I didn’t want to disappoint. “Don’t open this door,” she’d said. “Non se ne parla.” We don’t talk about that. I knew Nada was on the other side. When my grandmother died, I gave myself permission to get to know her. But with my grandmother gone, I could no longer open

I first learned about Nada Peretti from my grandmother. My grandmother always heard what she wanted to hear, and only ever spoke of things she was ready to acknowledge. In our family, that is the way. She never intended for me to take an interest in her aunt, but it was her writing that led me straight to Nada, and to Nada’s naughty book. While on a visit to a relative’s house not too far from Morrovalle, the town where my grandmother's family is from, my dad’s sisters and I

I didn’t grow up or get educated in Italy, so if I was going to unravel this family mystery, I had a LOT of catching up to do. I couldn’t in a vacuum figure out what had actually happened in that room in March of 1927 if I didn’t understand what led up to it, and people are shaped by their environment, so I had to learn about the world that Nada and Enea move through. But first, I had to get my hands on that damn book! It wasn’t hard to find out what the title was. One web se

My first inkling that there was more to Nada’s story came when I began reading the reviews of her book. Unable to get my hands on the book itself at that point in my research process, I was content to dig up the handful of contemporary reviews and modern academic analyses of the book so I could get a gist for what, exactly, was so scandalous about it. I of course assumed that my grandmother’s reticence to talk about her aunt, who by any measure had had an extraordinary amount