Name Isabella Morra Died 1546 | Role Poet | |
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Isabella di Morra (ca. 1520–1545/1546) was an Italian poet of the Renaissance. An unknown figure in her lifetime, she was forced by her brothers to live in segregation, which estranged her from courts and literary salons. While living in solitude in her castle, she produced a small body of work, which never circulated in the literary milieu of the time. Her short and melancholic life ended when her brothers murdered her for a suspected affair.
Contents
Only thirteen poems by her have survived to this day. Despite the small corpus she left, her work is considered to be among of the most powerful and original poetic expressions of Italian literature from the XVI century. The style and the topics she dealt with make her a forerunner of Romantic poetry and her lyrics are often subject for feminist criticism.
Early life
Isabella di Morra was born into a noble family in Favale (now Valsinni, in the province of Matera), at the time part of the Kingdom of Naples. She was the daughter of Giovanni Michele di Morra, baron of Favale, and Luisa Brancaccio, noblewoman belonging to a Neapolitan family. Her birthdate is uncertain: generally, reference is made to the study by Benedetto Croce which puts it around 1520, although she could be born earlier, about 1515 and 1516.
As a child, Isabella was educated in literature and poetry by her father. She, her mother and her siblings (five brothers: Marcantonio, Scipione, Decio, Cesare, Fabio, and one sister: Porzia) were abandoned by Giovanni Michele in 1528, when he was forced to seek refuge in France after having supported the invading French army against the Spanish monarch Charles V for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples. He could have returned to Favale as his crime against the Spanish crown was pardoned but he remained in France serving in the army and as a councilor of Francis I as well as attending court festivities. The youngest child, Camillo, was born after he left.
Scipione followed his father shortly after and the eldest sibling Marcantonio then took over power in Favale. Isabella grew up in a hostile family environment, with a helpless mother and her brothers who were uncouth, unruly and brutes. She was deeply affected by the sudden departure of her father, which tormented her for the rest of her life. She was given a tutor who guided her in the study of Petrarch and Latin poets and probably the only person with whom she could talk about literature.
Youth
From the beginning, animosity marked the relationship between Isabella and her three younger brothers Cesare, Decio and Fabio, who presumably envied their gifted sister and the attention lavished on her education. They forced her to live in severe isolation in the family castle of Favale, perched on a high-rising cliff above the Ionian sea. In the castle Isabella dedicated herself to writing poems, finding in poetry the only solace to her solitude.
Nonetheless, she had the opportunity to befriend her learned neighbors: Diego Sandoval de Castro baron of Bollita (the present-day Nova Siri) and castellan of Cosenza, and his wife Antonia Caracciolo. Of Spanish heritage, Diego Sandoval de Castro, defined as a handsome and brave soldier who fought for Charles V's army in the Algiers expedition, was a published poet, member of the Florentine Academy and well connected to the power structure in Naples being a protégé of Viceroy Pedro de Toledo. Perhaps encouraged and helped by her tutor, Isabella and Diego Sandoval began a secret epistolary correspondence, when he began to send her letters in the name of his wife with some poems enclosed to which Isabella might have answered.
Rumors about a hidden liaison began to emerge, although their relationship is a mystery to this day and it is unclear whether or not they were more than just friends; except for a brief reference to marriage, the surviving work of Isabella includes no love poem addressed to a man, while Diego's lyrics described his feelings towards his beloved, possibly referring to a specific woman, or simply conventional laments following the poetic canon of the era. However, Isabella's brothers Decio, Cesare and Fabio, after being informed of the letters, suspected an extramarital affair between their sister and the nobleman and, in order to cleanse the family honor, prepared a cruel punishment.
Death
They murdered her tutor, who carried the letters acting as an intermediary. Next they hunted down Isabella, as she was found with the letters in her hands according to the reports of the time. She was stabbed to death. Two of them escaped to France but they soon reunited with the evident intention of concluding their revenge against Diego Sandoval who, fearing for his life, hired an escort in vain. The three assassins, with the help of two uncles and probably fueled by hatred against the Spaniards, killed him in the woods near Noja (today known as Noepoli) several months later.
The death of Isabella went almost unnoticed and even approved by society according to the code of honor of the XVI century, whereas Diego Sandoval's murder was hardly persecuted. Her year of death is not known with certainty and it happened most likely among 1545 and 1546, though other studies suggest she died in 1547 or 1548. It is believed that she was buried in the local church of San Fabiano but no grave and no trace leading to her have been found. While visiting Valsinni, Croce tried to discover Isabella's tomb but renovations in the church obscured all traces of di Morra family burials and his exploration in an underground wall revealed only heaps of bones.
Aftermath
The murderers were forced to flee the Kingdom of Naples to escape the wrath of Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, who ordered the whole province be scoured. They joined their father in France, who allegedly died shortly after the tragedy as he was still living and receiving a pension in 1549. They were judged guilty in absentia. Scipione, although shocked and disgusted by the massacre, resigned himself to helping his brothers. Decio became a priest and Cesare married a French noblewoman but, there is no certain information about Fabio. Scipione, who was secretary to Queen Catherine de' Medici, was later fatally poisoned by other court members who were envious of him.
Meanwhile, the remaining brothers were taken to trial. Marcantonio, who did not take part in the conspiracy, was imprisoned for some months and then released. The youngest brother, Camillo, who also had nothing to do with the murders, was absolved of complicity.
Poetry
The poems of Isabella were discovered when the gendarmery entered her estate to investigate the murder. There are ten sonnets and three canzoni, which were published posthumously. She has been associated with the 1500s literary movement known as Petrarchism, a revival of Petrarch's model launched by Pietro Bembo. Although her form, vocabulary and phrases followed the Petrarchist fashion of the period, she is distinguished by her dramatic tone related to poets such as Dante Alighieri and Jacopone da Todi. Her poetry is very personal, influenced by her own family condition and forced isolation; she wrote on impulse in order to vent her frustration, without any particular literary adornment and formal elegance.
Unlike other women's canzonieri, which are principally based on a celebration of idealized love, in Isabella's work there is only space for existential pain, grudge and loneliness, making her a distinct figure among Petrarchist poets of the time. Marriage is the only short reference to love which would not only satisfy her social and feminine position, but it would be the only way to leave the oppressive environment she lived in. Her poetry describes the grief she felt at being isolated, her separation from other literary people and missing her father, with nature as the primary interlocutor of her verses.
Isabella herself defined her style as "bitter, harsh and lamentful" (amaro, aspro e dolente) or "rough and frail" (ruvido e frale). Fortune is the main antagonist of her work, blamed for depriving her of happiness and freedom. Fortune is her depiction of mankind's cruelty towards "every well-bred heart" (ogni ben nato core), implicitly condemning a world in which tyranny and violence prevail over virtue.
She expressed repugnance towards her homeland described as "infernal valley" (valle inferna) and "denigrated site" (denigrato sito), surrounded by "lonely and dark woods" (selve erme ed oscure), inhabited by "irrational people, deprived of intelligence" (gente irrazional, priva d'ingegno) and crossed by the "turbid Siri" (torbido Siri, today known as Sinni) the river running in the valley below her castle, whose continuous murmur as it flowed downstream into the sea worsened her sense of isolation and despair. She mentioned to throw herself symbolically into her loved and hated river, perhaps alluding to suicide. This has led to a singular theory that her sister Porzia and Sandoval were corresponding and then victims of the massacre; therefore Isabella, affected by the tragedy, threw herself into the river, since there is no clue as to where she might have been buried.
She scanned the sea waiting for a ship to bring good news about her exiled father (who actually lived comfortable in France, ignoring her terrible fate), a vain hope that her condition would improve with his return. Charles V (known as "Caesar" in the lyrics) is accused of "preventing a father from helping his daughter" (privar il padre di giovar la figlia) and Francis I is the "great king" (gran re), to whom all hopes for her own liberation were addressed but they were shattered as the French monarch was finally defeated by his rival, making Isabella even more depressed. Her mother is portrayed as an old and miserable woman unable to control her children; her brothers were "in extreme and horrid indolence" (in estrema ed orrida fiacchezza) blaming Fortune for depriving them of the kindness inherited by their ancestors and complaining of their uncouth and despotic manners by saying: "by those not understanding me through ignorance, I am, alas, reproached" (da chi non son per ignoranza intesa i' son, lassa, ripresa).
She also paid a tribute to poet Luigi Alamanni who took refuge in France after a conspiracy against cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII. She talked about her "pitiful end" (miserando fine) and "now that I feel my bitter end close" (or ch’io sento da presso il fine amaro), which lead to think she was aware of her imminent murder or maybe because a serious illness. In the last compositions she found consolation in Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, where she seems to have finally accepted her painful existence and tried to find her peace of mind, apparently reconciling herself with the land she once despised. Her final hope is to see herself "totally freed from the stormy terrestrial cloud, and among the blessed souls" (sgombrata tutta dal terrestre nembo, e fra l’alme beate).
Legacy
A few years after her death, the lyrics began to circulate in Naples and were read with pity and admiration, and then sent to Venice, where some of her verses appeared in Book 3 of Lodovico Dolce's anthology, Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d'altri nobilissimi intelletti (Verses of several esteemed Neapolitan gentlemen and other highly noble intellects) in 1552. The entire production was later included in Lodovico Domenichi's Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne (Several verses of some highly noble and virtuous women) in 1559. In 1629, her nephew Marcantonio, son of Camillo, published a family biography entitled Familiae nobilissimae de Morra historia (History of the highly noble di Morra family), giving details regarding her life and death which were unknown until its release.
Despite her work was later included in other anthologies, Isabella was almost forgotten and ignored by critics over the centuries. After a long period of silence, which lasted until the beginnings of the XIX century, she was rediscovered by Angelo De Gubernatis in 1901, while helding a conference in a literature circle in Bologna. In 1907, De Gubernatis published Isabella Morra. Le rime (Isabella Morra. The rhymes), including annotations and an introductory biography of Isabella drawn from her nephew's monograph of the di Morra family. But it was Benedetto Croce who released her first historically documented biography and provided a critical essay, reevaluating de facto her figure in the Italian literary scene. Croce praised her poetry for its "passionate immediacy" and "abandonment of feelings" very different from the prevailing poetry of that time, which he considered "precious and artificial".
According to Paul F. Grendler's Encyclopedia of the Renaissance in association with The Renaissance Society of America, her work is an "impressive prefigurement of Romanticism" and "no other poet prior to Isabella di Morra infused such personal depth into poetry, bringing new drama to the lyric precisely because it so closely addresses the tragic circumstances of her life", contributing "to the development of a new sensibility in poetic language, one grounded in a kind of life writing that raises the biographical, the political, the familial, and the personal to a genuinely lyric stature". She is cited as a precursor to Giacomo Leopardi due to similar themes, feelings and life experiences. Her poetry is also considered a possible influence on Torquato Tasso as it is eerily echoed in his poem Canzone al Metauro (Canzone to Metauro, 1578).
Isabella has been portrayed by Anny Duperey in the eponymous drama performed at the Théâtre d'Orsay, Paris, on 23 April 1974. It was written by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and directed by Jean-Louis Barrault.
A literary park named after her was established in her hometown Valsinni in 1993, where theatrical and musical performances take place.
The theatrical work Storia di Isabella di Morra raccontata da Benedetto Croce (The story of Isabella di Morra as told by Benedetto Croce) by Dacia Maraini was staged in Valsinni (1999) and Rome (2000).
The Io Isabella International Film Week festival is dedicated to her memory.