«Dall’altra parte del cielo»: la voce di Anna Maria Ortese

«The whole history of women’s lives is full of silences, of inhuman cries, sometimes, but more often of silence, the silence of the victims and of lying words, of the force that expresses itself in equally lying words, on the acquiescence and above all the necessity of the victims». So, says, in 1989, one of the speeches in which Anna Maria Ortese’s ethical militancy in support of the «rights of the last» most vibrates. The «disorientation» experienced during the long journey through Italy in a post-war period «immediately lacking in unity and memory», the involvement in the editorial adventure of the magazine «Sud», in the adhesion to the visionary reformist design of its founder Pasquale Prunas amplify, over the years, Ortese’s tension to offer space and speech to the «poor of all times». We will dwell on the ways in which, between the visionary lucidity of narrative invention and the disorienting vigour of non-fiction prose, an unprecedented societal re-foundation emerges of which the female figure becomes a potential vector. The intention is to highlight how, in the systematic violation of all gender rhetoric, Anna Maria Ortese grasps in differences, in inner diversity the foundation of human relations, the principle of a truly civil and free community life, founded on solidarity between living beings, on «fraternity with the world of nature».