Alda Merini, mia madre

Alda Merini is the most loved poet of the Italian ‘900, because she has been able to sublimate her painful biographical experience in pure poetry. This is part of the reason she has been praised by important literary critics and at the same time adored by readers so much so as to become a sort of pop icon.

Her life was fascinating and thrilling, dramatic and exceptional: the precocious talent and the association from a very young age with the great intellectuals of her time, mental illness and hospitalizations in the asylum, the two weddings and the great loves, the celebrity arrived late, the world/neighborhood of Navigli in Milan.

Emanuela Carniti, Alda’s eldest daughter, was born when Alda was twenty-four years old and, the only one of the four daughters not to be fostered and to remain at home with her parents until she was twenty, became a sort of mother to her own. She is therefore able to reconstruct her mother’s life in everyday life and in the domestic dimension, but also in literary and editorial events, made up of years of silence and others of success.

Alda Merini told her story in poems and in many interviews, but often with a fantastic re-enactment of memory, so as to leave room for rough and unreliable biographies.

Her daughter Emanuela has the merit of restoring a bit of order and truth, telling it with great lucidity and love, and a frank portrait emerges, much more complex than what was previously known: childhood after the war, the strong attachment to her father, the difficulty in adapting to the life of wife and mother, generosity, narcissism, eccentricities.

The passionate and sincere story of a woman, a mother, an artist who, despite a thousand dark moments, never gave up, an almanac of intimate and familiar memories that give us back the generous and authentic portrait of a writer who made her inner pain an extraordinary creative lymph.