Lalla Romano

Writer

• Born: November 11, 1906
• Birthplace: Demonte, Italy
• Died: June 26, 2001

Biography

Lalla Romano was born in 1906 in Demonte, Italy. Her father, Roberto Romano, was a land surveyor and her mother, Giuseppina Peano Romano, was the niece of Giuseppe Peano, the renowned mathematician best known for his contributions to modern symbolic logic. When Romano was ten, her family moved to Cuneo, her parents’ birthplace, and she attended gymnasium and the classical lyceum there.

Romano earned a degree in Italian literature from the University of Turin in 1928 and trained as a painter under Giovanni Guarlotti and Felice Casorati. It was in Casorati’s atelier that she made lifelong friendships with Daphne Maughan, Carlo Levi, Paola Levi-Montalcini, and Mario Soldati. She attended the University of Debrecen in Hungary for a summer session in 1929 and then returned to Cuneo to teach at the local teachers’ college, regularly traveling to Turin to continue studying with Casorati.

In 1932, Romano married Innocenzo Monti, a banker whom she met while hiking near Cuneo. Monti would eventually become president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in the mid-1970’s. Monti and Romano had a son, Piero, in 1933, and they moved to Turin in 1935. In Turin, Romano continued to teach, wrote, and frequently exhibiting her paintings.

She published her first poetry collection in 1941 and worked as a translator during the early 1940’s. During World War II, Romano, allied with the anti-Fascist movement, Giustizia Liberià, hid in her childhood home in Cuneo with her son to avoid air raids. While there she produced Tre racconti, an Italian translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Trois contes (1877) on a commission received from a friend who worked for the publisher, Einaudi.

In 1947, Romano and her family moved to Milan, and she abandoned painting to write full-time. She contributed articles to several literary journals and in 1951 published Le metamorfosi, an experimental prose work. Her first novel, Maria, received the Veillon Prize. She also received the Pavese Prize in 1957 for the novel Tetto murato, and in 1959 she retired from teaching, traveling throughout Europe and other parts of the world.

Romano wrote prolifically after her retirement, and her writing from the 1960’s was consistently praised. La penombra che abbiamo attraversato received the Librai Milanesi Prize in 1964; a revised edition of Le metamorfosi took the Soroptimist Prize in 1967; and Le parole tra noi leggere was given the Strega Prize in 1969. She received the Sebeto Prize in 1974 and the Pena d’Oro Prize from the Government of Italy in 1979, the same year she won the Medaglia d’Oro di Benemerenza Civica. She also received the Terre del Piemonte Prize in 1994. A two-volume collection of her works was published in 1991 and 1992.

Romano’s writing is highly influenced by her personal experiences, particularly her relationships with family members. Her best-selling novel, Le parole tra noi leggere, explores her son’s rebellion against his parents, and although highly self-critical, implies that Piero was unsuccessful, an implication contradicted by the fact that Piero published his first book the same year.

In the mid-1970’s, Romano became affiliated with the Italian Communist Party, serving as town council in Milan in 1976, but she resigned after a year, abandoning politics to devote herself to writing. After her husband’s death in 1984, she wrote significantly less but produced Nei mari estremi: Romanzo, a novel describing his illness and death. She assisted in the editing of her collected works, was honored by a conference focusing on her writing in 1994, and in 1996 her ninetieth birthday was commemorated with an exhibition of paintings she created before 1945.