The «Diario di una scrittrice»: Alba de Céspedes and her collaboration on «Epoca» between 1958 and 1960

Abstract

The essay analyses the column Diario di una scrittrice that Alba de Céspedes wrote in «Epoca» between 1958 and 1960, through a cross-reading of the 63 articles that appeared weekly, the author's unpublished personal diaries and her correspondence with Arnoldo Mondadori and the magazine's editor Enzo Biagi, currently preserved at the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori in Milan. In this way, the work reconstructs Alba de Céspedes's contacts with the Italian and French cultural (literary, theatrical and cinematographic) milieu, and sheds light on certain aspects of the writer's poetics that help us understand her literary production in the 1960s. The essay is accompanied by two appendices: one contains eight unpublished letters by Céspedes, Biagi and Mondadori, the other a selection of six articles from the column.