«Sincerità artistica» e «moralità letteraria»: lo «spazio di resistenza» di Anna Maria Ortese

In the editorial note to *Mare non bagna Napoli*, published as part of Einaudi’s ‘Gettoni’ series in 1953, Elio Vittorini portrays Anna Maria Ortese as ‘a gypsy lost in a dream’, alluding to that sense of ‘disorientation’ which had intensified during the writer’s long wanderings across an Italy that had only just emerged from the rubble of the war. ‘Sometimes, home is nowhere. Sometimes one knows only alienation and estrangement,’ writes bell hooks in her *In Praise of the Margin*; and, indeed, a painful sense of estrangement grips Ortese as she travels through a country – particularly in the south – disfigured by the conflict, in spite of the abstract populist rhetoric and a certain glorification of reconstruction. It was from this ‘painful estrangement’ that her involvement in the publishing venture *Sud* – the ‘ultra-modern and radical’ *Quincenal of Literature and Art* edited by Pasquale Prunas – began to take shape. The aim is to highlight how, from as early as the short story *Dolente splendore del vicolo* (The Painful Splendour of the Alley), which appeared in 1946 in the seventh issue of the magazine, Ortese delves beyond the ‘magnificent and progressive destinies’ boasted of by Italian cities in the post-war period, aligning herself with all those hard-working yet outcast people, who, like her, were marked by a—albeit different—fate of separation. It will be argued that, in this sense, ‘marginality’ becomes, in Ortese’s writing, ‘a place of radical possibility, a space of resistance’.