Synopsis

She is the daughter of Carlo and granddaughter of Nello Rosselli, two prominent anti-fascists killed in 1937. She grew up between France, England, the United States, and Italy. She studied composition and ethnomusicology, played the violin and piano, and spoke three languages. She was in contact with the leading Italian intellectuals of her time, yet she always lived in an intimate and literary elsewhere, one of profound psychological suffering and, at the same time, extraordinary linguistic experimentation. She is Amelia Rosselli, and much has been written about her. This book, however, is not about her, but through her. It is the testimony of an encounter, that between a young woman of today and her work, and of one of the possible ways of reading poetry: by resonating with its dictation, seeking through this means to give voice to the gaps and fractures present in real life. In these pages, Alice Zanotti recounts Amelia Rosselli not with the yardstick of a biographer but with the participation of a young woman in love, who illuminates minute details and freely imagines what history does not reveal. The fraught relationship with her parents, the many languages ​​heard and spoken, the homes, the books, the missed appointments: everything falls apart and comes back together like an undertow that on every page brings to life the memory of a woman with a painful life and an inimitable voice.