Antonia Pozzi: The Italian Sylvia Plath Remembered

Antonia Pozzi (1912–1938) is remembered as the Italian Sylvia Plath, a poet of intense verses composed during a brief and tormented life. Born in Milan to lawyer Roberto Pozzi and Countess Livia Cavagna Sangiuliani, she began writing poetry as a teenager at Liceo Manzoni, where she had a relationship with her Latin and Greek teacher Antonio Maria Cervi, forcibly ended by her parents in 1933. She studied modern philology at the University of Milan alongside Vittorio Sereni, Luciano Anceschi, Dino Formaggio, and Enzo Paci, graduating in 1935 with a thesis on Gustave Flaubert under Professor Antonio Banfi. A cultured woman, she pursued amateur photography, studied languages, traveled across Europe, and loved cycling around the family villa in Pasturo, Lecco. Her poetry, influenced by the hermeticism of Sergio Corazzini, uses simple yet precise words that Eugenio Montale called "dry and hard as stones." Scholar Maria Corti described her as a hypersensitive soul with a strong character and philosophical intelligence, trapped by a paranoid paternal censorship and a stifling religious family environment. After the 1938 racial laws affected her friends, she wrote to Sereni: "Perhaps the age of words is over forever." She taught at the Schiaparelli technical institute, helped the poor, and began a novel on Lombard history. Despite her passions, she committed suicide on December 3, 1938, at age 26, near the Abbey of Chiaravalle. Her archive is preserved in Pasturo.