Alda  Merini 

Who was Alda Merini?

Story of a woman, of a poetess, of a warrior

I was born on the twenty-first in spring

But I didn’t know that being born insane,

opening clods

could stir up tempest.

Alda Merini was born in Milan on 21st March 1931. She died in her city on 1st November 2009 due to a bone cancer. She was 78. So she said about  her existence: «I have enjoyed life because I like the hell of life too and life is often a hell. My life has been beautiful because I paid for it dearly».

Poetry and asylums will be two constants in her life. In 1947, when she is only 16 she is positioned in the psychiatric  clinic of Villa Turro for a month: she is diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. In 1954 she marries the baker Ettore Carniti and four daughters are born from the marriage: Emanuela, Barbara, Flavia and Simonetta. But, following the second pregnancy, in 1958, Alda falls into postpartum depression. Then she is placed in a psychiatric clinic and nothing will go back to the way it was. That’s how Alda talks about the reclusion and about her daughters: «When I was hospitalized in an insane asylum for the first time, I was little more than a child, yes, I had two daughters and some experience behind me but my soul has remained simple, clear, waiting for something beautiful in my horizon. (…) I tried to talk about these things to my husband but he made no sign of understanding them and so my breakdown got worse and,  after  my mother’s death whom I really cared about, things went from bad to worse, so much so, that one day, exasperated by the huge work and continued poverty, and, who knows, prey to the fumes of evil, I had a fit of rage and my husband didn’t find anything better than to call an ambulance, not predicting that it would take me back to the mental hospital. It was there that I thought I was going mad.». 

«I had four daughters, brought up by other families. I don’t even know how I found the time to give birth to them. I always urge them to say that they are the daughters of the poetess Alda Merini. They move me». 

Alda stops writing for twenty years. She starts back in 1979, by telling the experience of the asylum. In the 90s she gets a lot of literary awards, among them  the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale for Poetry (1993) and the Procida-Elsa Morante award (1997). 

Her life has always been an endless challenge, a constant rejection to surrender. 

She used to say: «If women are shallow it is because they are extremely intelligent»