Goliarda Sapienza (1924–1996)

Goliarda Sapienza was born in Catania, Sicily, into a left-wing family. Her father Giuseppe "Peppino" Sapienza was a socialist lawyer, and her mother Maria Guidice was a feminist activist and prominent Socialist Party organizer. As a child, Goliarda was taken out of school by her father to protect her from the Fascist curriculum. What she loved best was reenacting roles in films she had seen in the cinema. At age 16, she won a scholarship to study at the Academy of Dramatic Arts (Reale Accademia d’Arte Drammatica) in Rome, where she moved with her mother. During the Nazi Occupation, she participated in the resistance movement in Rome. After the war, she began a successful career in both films and on stage. In 1947, she met Francesco Maselli, a Neorealist film director, who became her partner for 20 years, and with whom she moved in creative and literary circles along with Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Attilio Bertolucci, and Elsa Morante. In the late 1950s, she experienced serious depression and received electroconvulsive shock treatment, which caused her to partially lose her memory. She recovered following psychoanalytic therapy and focused on writing, producing more than a novels and plays, plus short stories and collections of poems.
She published several semi-autobiographical novels,
including Lettera aperta
(Open Letter, 1967), and
Il filo di mezzogiorno
(Midday Thread, 1969). She spent about 10 years writing her magnum opus,
L’arte della gioia
(The Art of Joy), completed in 1976 but rejected by all publishers because of its length of more than 700 pages, its sexual content, and its portrayal of a woman unrestrained by conventional morality and traditional feminine roles. In 1980, Goliarda spent a few days in prison after being convicted of theft; her prison experience and later friendship with some women she met there were fictionalized in
the novels L’università di Rebibbia
(Rebibbia University, 1983) and
its sequel, Le certezze del dubbio
(The Certainties of Doubt, 1987). In the last years of her life, she taught acting at the
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
in Rome. Several of her books were published posthumously, including L'arte della gioia, which finally appeared in 1998 and was successful thanks to French, German, and Spanish translations; Destino coatto (2002); and Io, Jean Gabin (2009). These launched a re-evaluation of her life and works that have since become a source of inspiration to other artists.