Call for Papers 🇬🇧

Cara amica ti scrivo.
Stories of friendship and relational networks among women in Italian literature, cinema, and media.

Interdisciplinary Conference – Sapienza University of Rome – 25 and 26 June 2026
Conference funded by a Sapienza Third Mission Start-up Project – CATS

The international conference Cara amica ti scrivo focuses on the representation and various forms of friendship between women. By analyzing the significance of female relationships in Italian literary, cultural, and audiovisual production, the conference opens a debate from an interdisciplinary perspective. The theme of the conference is situated within two main research strands: first, a renewed interest in the representation of the female friendship experience, also explored within the field of Girlhood Studies. This field involves a wide range of disciplines but remains underdeveloped within Italian Studies, with only a few exceptions (Campofreda and Ceravolo 2022).

Secondly, network analysis has highlighted how interpersonal relationships between female authors and/or cultural producers have influenced the history of literature and cinema. To trace this line of research, it is essential to draw upon epistolary materials—precious documents that attest to female complicity (Viella 1999)—and to examine the spaces of social gathering open to women. From convents to academies, and from literary circles to militant meetings, these spaces have not only fostered female friendship and cooperation but have also provided models for artistic and literary transposition (Modesti 2022; Donato and Martin 2024).

The relevance of this theme has also been highlighted by Adriana Cavarero, who in her essay Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti (1997) exemplified the centrality of relationality in the formation of a personal — including literary — identity. Building on this line of research, the Conference aims to renew attention to the various topoi connected to female relationality which, from their origins to the present day, have traversed literary history in different forms.
These emerging lines of research in the field of Italian production have attracted renewed interest following the growing prominence of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011), a tetralogy that has brought the complexity of female friendship back to the forefront (Romero Guarro 2019; Santovetti 2016).

Riding the wave of an international phenomenon that intensified the debate on friendship among women (Hollinger 1998), a new critical attention to the theme has flourished, including within children’s production (Casella 2006; Marini-Maio and Nerenberg 2018; Di Martino 2024). Among the most significant examples are Bianca Pitzorno’s Ascolta il mio cuore (1991), the comic W.I.T.C.H. by Gnone, Barbucci and Canepa (2001), and the global success of Iginio Straffi’s Winx (2004).

Given the multiplicity of topics and approaches on the subject, a number of suggestions are proposed, not to be regarded as binding:

• Genealogies and Networks. Looking at relationships among women, understood as genuine creative and intellectual partnerships, helps reconstruct a subterranean and often overlooked literary geography. As early as the Middle Ages, it is possible to identify examples of exclusively female aggregations, such as the lay order of the Beguines. Within these communities, study, exegesis, and the production of spiritual writings played a central role (Parisi 2021).

Another interesting case is represented by correspondence between women in the Humanist and Renaissance periods: in this regard, one may look at the letter collections of Cassandra Fedele and Laura Cereta, dating to the second half of the fifteenth century, which offer valuable testimony to female intellectual bonds.

Female support networks have also developed around other, more contemporary media: tools such as radio and television have at times fostered new spaces for dialogue among women. This is the case, for example, of the radio program 3131: Sala F, broadcast on Radiodue in 1976, a format hosted by Lidia Motta and created entirely by women (Perrotta 2025).

• Geographies of Encounter. Access to spaces of literary circulation such as courts, salons, and academies has always shaped women’s active participation in poetic production. One may think, for instance, of the decisive role played by women as a privileged audience within the context of the Sienese Academies (Bruscagli 1982; Riccò 2002).

Beginning in the modern era, the conquest of social spaces such as schools, cultural clubs, and editorial offices made female friendship a driving force of public emancipation (emblematically represented by the figure of Anna Maria Mozzoni), as well as a private bond. Through the press and the political movements of the late nineteenth century, women wove networks of collaboration and intellectual exchange, as occurred at the Esposizione Beatrice in Florence (1890).
Observation of these spaces of female interaction also gave rise to a film genre that became popular during the 1930s, with titles such as Seconda B, Maddalena Zero in condotta, Teresa Venerdì, and Un garibaldino al convento.

• Poetics of Relationships. Part of the debate concerns the analysis of recurring representational models, which have made it possible to understand how female subjectivity has been narrated as oscillating between complicity and conflict. Such models are never neutral; rather, they respond to dominant cultural visions, ideological constructs, and horizons of expectation that shift over time.
  Spaces of growth, exchange, and symbolic resistance begin to occupy a central place in certain nineteenth-century narratives (Mitchell 2008), as in the pages of Cuore infermo by Matilde Serao (1881).
  Over the course of the twentieth century, female friendship increasingly came to be framed politically as a relationship of solidarity within a patriarchal context, as evidenced by the short story collection Le donne muoiono by Anna Banti (1951). Resilience and friendship also become a primary pairing in several other twentieth-century narratives, among which L’università di Rebibbia by Goliarda Sapienza (1983) is perhaps the most celebrated case.
  Finally, children’s literature offers several interesting case studies for reflecting on the construction of female identity through bonds of friendship; among these, a significant example is the international phenomenon of the Tea Sisters, created by Elisabetta Dami (2007).

• From Representation to Self-Representation. This line of inquiry adopts a comparative perspective that contrasts the approach of male voices with female authorship in representing the same phenomenon.
  An example of a reaction to male hegemony can be found in the dialogic work Il merito delle donne by Moderata Fonte (1600), in which the “civil conversation” among seven women on female superiority reclaims common formats of male prose, functioning as a counterpoint to the widespread misogynistic treatises of the late sixteenth century.
  The aim of this research perspective is to question who holds the power of narration, in order to understand which visions have been imposed, which erased, and which new horizons are emerging in contemporary cultural production. Emblematic in this respect is the twentieth-century novel Tra donne sole by Cesare Pavese (1949), in which the representation of friendship dynamics provides an opportunity to address broader themes. The same text was later adapted for the screen collaboratively by Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Alba de Céspedes, who turned it into the film Le amiche by Antonioni (1955).

Committees