Alba Florio (21 April 1910 – 31 May 2011) was an Italian poet, the last belonging to the

Decadentism The Decadent movement (from the French ''décadence'', ) was a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The Decadent movement first flourished ...

current.

Life

Alba Florio was born on 21 April 1910 in

Scilla ''Scilla'' () is a genus of about 30 to 80 species of bulb-forming perennial plant, perennial herbaceous plants in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Scilloideae. Sometimes called the squills in English, they are native to woodlands, subalpine ...

and grew up in

Calabria Calabria is a Regions of Italy, region in Southern Italy. It is a peninsula bordered by the region Basilicata to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, the Strait of Messina to the southwest, which separates it from Sicily, and the Tyrrhenian S ...

, soaking up its traditions and its ways of thinking and putting everything in verses since her teenage years. Her introverted nature and the fact that she lived in a tiny village in Calabria kept her away from all the cultural and editorial circles, which led to poor diffusion of her work. When ''Estasi e preghiere'' (1929), her first poetry collection, came out, very few people noticed the young poet. The old poet Vincenzo Gerace, that shared her Calabrian origin, was one of the few who did notice wrote an ode about her. ''Oltremorte (1936)'' was the last of Alba's hermetic works. In her writing, she was heavily influenced by

Giovanni Pascoli Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli (; 31 December 1855 – 6 April 1912) was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the grea ...

, echoed the dramatic tones of

Giuseppe Ungaretti Giuseppe Ungaretti (; 8 February 1888 – 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experi ...

and opened herself to

Salvatore Quasimodo Salvatore Quasimodo (; 20 August 1901 – 14 June 1968) was an Italian poet and translator, awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times" ...

's new propositions: in those years, Quasimodo was living in Messina and

Reggio Calabria Reggio di Calabria (; ), commonly and officially referred to as Reggio Calabria, or simply Reggio by its inhabitants, is the List of cities in Italy, largest city in Calabria as well as the seat of the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria. As ...

. With ''Oltremorte'' Alba won the "Maria Enrica Viola" poetry prize. In her two last collections, ''Troveremo il pane sconosciuto'' (1939) and ''Come mare a riva'' (1956), existential pessimism is deeply present and largely explored. «Vegliamo la tempesta / crocifissi alle rocce / albatri dagli occhi viola» («We watch over the storm / crucified to the rocks / Purple-eyed albatri»). The same themes represent in many of Lorenzo Calogero lyrics, born in the same years and place as Alba. Alba died on 31 May 2011 in

Messina Messina ( , ; ; ; ) is a harbour city and the capital city, capital of the Italian Metropolitan City of Messina. It is the third largest city on the island of Sicily, and the 13th largest city in Italy, with a population of 216,918 inhabitants ...

. She was 100 years old.

Collections

* ''Estasi e preghiere'', Messina, 1929. * ''Oltremorte'', Milano, I.T.E., 1936. * ''Troveremo il paese sconosciuto'', Modena, Guanda, 1939. * ''Come mare a riva'', Messina, 1956. * ''Ultima striscia di cielo'', Cosenza, Pellegrini, 2000 (introduction by Antonio Piromalli).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Floria, Alba 1910 births 2011 deaths People from Scilla, Calabria 20th-century Italian poets Italian women centenarians