Quando acqua e sole bastano a consolare

The narrative settings appear as one of the key elements of Milena Milani’s prose. They are characterised by a prevalence of urban spaces, followed by a significant presence of passages set by the sea. Their descriptions often correspond to real places of which the author had personal experience, including Venice, Milan, Rome and Albisola. The spaces are perceived from the protagonists’ point of view and affect their emotional states. The descriptions of urban spaces consist of built, human, natural and verbal elements, while marine settings imply positive connotations. The settings provide an important basis for numerous aspects of narration.

«Il festival rinascerà», Paola Masino inviata alla Manifestazione d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia del 1946

The essay presents and analyses the film criticism articles written by Paola Masino for the new edition of the Venice Film Festival after the Second World War. The articles, which appeared in the Gazzetta d’Italia between August 31 and September 19, 1946, were not later collected or republished. These are rare materials, never studied before, found among the documents of the Fondo Paola Masino kept at the Archivio del Novecento, Sapienza University of Rome. Other significant and useful information to understand Masino’s critical perspective on cinema emerges from the letters sent from Venice to family members. The analysis of the articles highlights in Paola Masino a lively intellectual curiosity and great precision in aesthetic judgments, in addition to a peculiar sensitivity to chromatic values, and an ethical attention to the political perspective of film directors and to the recent tragedies of war and partisan resistance in Italy. Among the most interesting data emerged from these articles, there are some theoretical reflections on aesthetic principles valid not only for cinema, but for all the arts, including the narrative and the literary work of the same Paola Masino.

Per un ritratto di Milena Milani

Milena Milani, writer and artist, was also the lover of a notorius Venetian art gallerist, Carlo Cardazzo. Her passionate and vitalist character could express her feelings and feminist ideas through intense and outrageous romances, as A Girl Called Giulio (1964), but also in a poetic and ardent visual production. Her paintings, collages, and ceramics show an inclination for the use of words according with a wider range of artistic movements, being also a special witness of the art system.

Diario veneziano e altri racconti: la rubrica di Milena Milani sul quotidiano La Stampa

This essay offers a thematic reading of some short stories appeared in the column that Milena Milani held in the daily newspaper La Stampa (Stampa Sera) from 1950 to 1964. In her texts, Venice is one of the cities of her youth, where to discover the everyday but also herself as a writer, a profession that will identify her spirit in life. My research also aims to highlight a brief catalogue of Milani’s short stories between the forties and the sixties that could be read in her books and in newspapers and magazines of that period. In the end, I also offer a list of her books in Italian Archives and author Funds connected to the Premio Strega: she wanted to participate to the prize in 1947 and then succeeded in 1954 and in 1964.

La ragazza di fronte. Milena Milani e le Edizioni del Cavallino

The essay retraces the period spent in Venice by Milena Milani between 1943 and 1945 and her experience, as a first-time writer and translator, at the Edizioni del Cavallino, the refined publishing house that Carlo Cardazzo had founded alongside the homonymous art gallery. The paper offers a reading of Milani’s works published by the Editioni del Cavallino: Ignoti furono i cieli (1944), L’estate (1946), La ragazza di fronte (1953).

Seduzioni e scenari veneziani

This paper analyses the exploratory and evolutionary path of the protagonist Jules – i.e. all her perceptions in the relationships with men and women – in the light of the dissolution of the postmodern self and the nomadism as a phenomenon of change in terms of gender, role and behaviour. In this sense, the categories of masculine and feminine in their narrative figurations, the materiality of the body and the physical and sexual instincts of the young Jules are investigated, demonstrating how this 1964 novel by Milena Milani seems to implicitly anticipate the process of giving a new meaning to the feminine subjectivity that was to accelerate remarkably from the 1970s onwards.

«Venezia appena l’ho vista non mi ha fatto nessuna impressione»: Paola Masino e il complesso rapporto con il capoluogo lagunare

From 1938 to 1950 Paola Masino had to follow Massimo Bontempelli in exile in Venice. It was a difficult period for Masino, always linked to her beloved Rome, during which she was unable to accept the lagoon environment. An intolerance transmitted in the various letters addressed to her parents, in which she complains of a certain inability to carry on her creative production. In reality they were years studded with numerous intellectual acquaintances and with the writing of various journalistic texts, without forgetting the publication of her best known novel, Nascita e morte della massaia. The essay, therefore, aims to investigate the relationship established by Paola Masino with Venice, in all its aspects.

Dalla scrivania tutta per sé al confino della Massaia

The essay retraces Masino’s life and work from 1938 until 1950 – the period of time she lived in Venice – through her private letters and memoirs (Album di vestiti). Masino transferred to Venice not of her own will, but to follow her companion, writer Massimo Bontempelli, who was compelled by the Fascist Regime to leave Rome. ìTherefore Masino’s relationship with Venice was conditioned from the political situation she lived in and deeply influenced the book she wrote in Venice from 1938 and 1941: Nascita e morte della massaia. Through the publisher’s letters and institutional documents the essay illustrates the censorship’s interventions on the text of her novel before she was allowed to publish it.

«Vorrei diventare una scrittrice importante»

The Storia di Anna Drei (1947) is analysed through a double level of reading inside the story that makes a good job of shedding light on the imaginary of the author, Milena Milani. On the one hand, there are retraced the stages of the conception of her first novel, as the writer recalled them in her autobiographical texts, in relation to the setting (Rome) she described in the novel she wrote in Venice and to the building, through her pages, of her figure as a writer. On the other hand, the story of the first edition of the novel, published in the series “Medusa degli italiani”, is investigated, following her participation in the Mondadori Prize, with which the publishing house had intended to open and renew its catalogue after the Second World War.