God Bless Gian Pietro Lucini

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 everything from an "intact prostitute" (due to a repeating trope in the novel where she remains above the fray every time things get spicy on the page, to an "asbestos-lined Phoenix of vice," and calls the book the "hysterical rantings of a psychopath." He also calls her a "virgin journalist," which is odd, because Nada wrote the book under pseudonym, so in theory he should not have known she was a journalist. Lucini's rant includes a comparison of Saffo to every other contemporaneously published piece of European literature with erotic themes, from Umberto Notari's Quelle Signore, to Collete's Claudine a L'ecole to Liane de Pougy's Idille Sapphique. Demonstrating that despite his shock, he was quite well versed in all the other books of the same genre.

There are several other lines in the review that give off the distinct impression that he not only knows who the author is, he has dirt on her that he's willing to hint at, but not full-throatedly print. One such line is the closing of his review, which goes: "I am told that the author boasts of being friends with a very high born noblewoman. She should gift the pious lady Sappho's Inheritance, since she is one of the leading patrons of the League for Public Morality."

It took a long time for me to uncover how and why Lucini had background information on Nada. Let's just say the rumor mill among the Italian intelligentsia worked very quickly, and Nada had been a little too loose with the details of her book with some of her male counterparts, who didn't waste time trying to keep a female author in her place.