Shelters of good. Shelters of evil. Anna Maria Ortese’s salvation attempt.

Abstract

One of the best writers of the 20 th century, Anna Maria Ortese, lived her whole life in the spirit of a deliberate distance from the world, a separation that was not a simple unfamiliarity with what worried her most, but rather a privileged viewing point from where to investigate and understand our times. Not a hideout but an active shelter, a lucid and piercing refuge from where to study the pain of reality. Following her publications and favouring the images of the native American, nature and the animals – emblematic of Anna Maria Ortese’s sensibility – the paper will show the main points of the author’s poetics, which always strives to recover the secrets of the world and to choose a refuge and fight from inside it for the salvation of herself and others.