You chose: italian women

  • On March 8, Italy celebrates International Women's Day with sprigs of mimosa. You can see the scented yellow clusters everywhere -- on lapels, in shop windows, and car windscreens. Most importantly, advances for women are visible in the law and employment.
  • On Nov. 15 beautiful Moira Orfei died in Brescia at age 84, plunging many Italians into a special kind of nostalgic mourning. A circus kid, she flew on a trapeze, appeared in 34 films and had two children. As her life shows, Italian women star in an huge variety of fields, from politics to cinema, haute cuisine. Here in Part I we begin to meet a few who go well beyond the traditional image of "la mamma." With Elena Cattaneo, Nadia Santini, Roberta Pinotti, Lina Wertmuller, Maria Teresa Salvemini Ristuccia
  • Southern-Italian American students have (albeit very limited) opportunity to study female representations in Italian Renaissance literature and in Italian American literature. However, there is virtually no opportunity to study female literary representations during the post-Risorgimento period when the northern dominated Italian government was exporting southern-Italian women by the millions in an effort to support Italy’s economy with American wages sent back to Italy. Accordingly, there is no opportunity to study the evolution of female literary representations from the onset of the Great Migration such as the “Scapigliatura” genre (e.g. the anti-bellesima “Fosca”) down to present day Italian American writers such as Lisa Scottoline.