Le donne muoiono

In this collection of short stories, Anna Banti once again recreates a world seen through women’s destinies. In a “sad bourgeois house” in the early twentieth century, women of different ages encounter rituals, grudges, and ambitions (“Conosco una famiglia”). Women in the twenty-seventh century are denied the ability to remember past lives and the only form of immortality available to them is art (“Le donne muoiono”). In eighteenth-century Venice, one of the young orphan girls of the Istituto della Pietà stands out for her exceptional musical talent, in one of Banti’s most famous stories (“Lavinia fuggita”). There are various literary inspirations in these texts, written between 1936 and 1950: Anna Banti explores her protagonists’ moods, their social isolation, and their rebellion against customs that we now recognize as patriarchal, which forced them into predetermined roles. As Giuliana Misserville points out, the collection Le donne muoiono (winner of the 1952 Viareggio Prize) raises some very relevant questions: what happens when a woman is denied the right to create? Have we really overcome the idea that art is predominantly men’s territory? The answer lies in these short stories, published to mark the 40th anniversary of the author’s passing