Due donne verso l’India di Tagore. L’epistolario inedito tra Anna Maria Ortese e Adriana Capocci Belmonte

Anna Maria Ortese was twenty-three and Adriana Capocci Belmonte was nineteen when their friendship began. It was a close and intense bond that supported both of them as they took their first steps into life, with dreams of love and self-expression. Adriana had been captivated by *Angelici dolori* and decided to meet the author.
The two young women, both gifted with keen intellects and eager for independence, began writing to each other, spending time together, sharing books, exchanging portraits and drawings, and walking together through life as they grappled with the society of the first half of the 20th century.
The most fruitful outcome of this existential and emotional bond—which this correspondence, still unpublished in its entirety, aims to highlight—lies in the gaze that the two women directed toward the East and India, suggesting a revolutionary aspect of inquiry into Anna Maria Ortese’s poetics: the influence of Rabindranath Tagore’s thought. Both women felt that India was a “homeland” to which they could return.
Adriana died prematurely and was unable to see her wish fulfilled, but Anna Maria lived through the entire century, drawing inspiration from those early years. In their correspondence, the references to Tagore point to a perspective on analysis and interpretation that proves fundamental to understanding the generative roots of Ortese’s poetics.
Exploring this private collection—a body of documents, writings, drawings, and photographs of extraordinary value, spanning the years 1938 to 1943—enriches the portrait of the writer by adding an intimate dimension, while also contributing to the reconstruction of an important historical, cultural, and political context.