Tuscan important woman in literature
Oriana Fallaci
Oriana Fallaci was born in Florence on the 29th of June of 1929. Her father, an active antifascist, involved her in the resistance movement as a sentinel. Carrying weapons from one side to the other of the Arno; at the age of fourteen she received a medal from the Italian army. After the high school she began her carrier as a journalist in a daily newspaper called “Mattino dell’Italia centrale”. She worked in Milan, in New York and for the weekly newspaper “Europeo” in Vietnam and Indo-China. In the 60's she began to write books, like “Penelope alla Guerra”, “Se il sole muore” and “Niente e così sia”. The first one is a novel in which a girl called Giovanna goes in New York for work, there she has a lot of adventures and she meets two boys, Richard, known at the time of the war, and Bill. She falls in love with Richard but at the same time she’s attracted by Bill too, her love story is strange, based on long Richard’s silent moments, with other friends she finds out Richard’s secret, he’s homosexual and he’s in love with Bill, in a first time she tries to escape from this situation but then she faces it. The second book is a diary about the American landing on the moon and the last is about the war in Vietnam. On the eve of the Olympic games of 1968, during a protest of some Mexican students, the writer was wounded by a gun, everyone believed she was dead and she’s been taken to a morgue, only a priest noticing she was still alive took her to an hospital. After this event she didn’t give up and she continued her work as writer and journalist. The next year she went in America to see the launch of the mission Apollo 11 and she’s the one who wrote the famous sentence of the commandant of the mission, Charles Conrad: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me”, referring to his short height. In 1973 she met Alekos Panagulis, a leader of the opposition movement to the Greek regime in that time, and she became his partner until the man’s death in a car incident.
She wrote his story in the book called “Un uomo”. Other important books are “Lettere a un bambino mai nato” and “Insciallah”. The first one is a monologue about the thoughts of a woman who’s pregnant and she doesn’t know if the baby wants to be born or not, after that the woman realizes that the world near her is an horrible place, she makes the baby dies and the woman receives accusations from the society around her. The second one is a novel about the civil war in Lebanon and it takes place between the Italian troops. In the last period of her life she lived in New York and she lectured in many American famous Universities like University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. After September 11 2001 she wrote three books criticising Islam extremists and the Islamic religion in general, because of this she received much public attention on newspapers. She died in Florence in 2006 at the age of 77 after a lung cancer caused by her bad habit of smoking. Her dream was to die in Florence in a Tower called “dei Mannelli” watching the Arno. The tower’s in the zone where the partisans’ headquarter was and she went there, when she was a child, with her father.
"women research group"
Francesca Chirico; Sara Zari
written by Francesca Chirico
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