Maria was a very strong and fundamental figure for Goliarda: arrested several times during demonstrations and protests, she maintained that her duty as a socialist was superior to that of a mother. As Goliardia pulls itself together, surrounded by beloved brothers and sisters who, like her, have to make a virtue of necessity: the twenty years of fascism are going on even harder at Sapienza, because parents fight fascism with a hardness and a conviction that is not so far from Mussolini’s ideas.
Among the alleys of Civita, Goliarda will have her first amorous and sexual experience with her friend Nica. Of course she couldn’t have known that her friend, who knew absolutely nothing about books and music and theater, was in reality not just a simple girl from the neighborhood, but her sister, the illegitimate daughter of her father Giuseppe.
In Civita you could have any type of experience and any type of work: so Goliarda begins to work as an assistant to a master puppeteer, Insanguine, who teaches her the love of reading and also of theatre; at seventeen he moved to Rome with his mother to attend the Academy of Dramatic Art.
A parenthesis of his life that sees it actress: he will work with Comencini, Visconti and Alessandro Citto Maselli. With his son, Francesco, she will begin a very long relationship – when they meet, he is sixteen and she is twenty-three -; it will be he who pushes her to write, after the death of Maria Giudice in 1953, a loss that leaves Goliarda depressed and sleepless.
Open letter it was published in 1967 – for Goliarda there will be depression, whiskey and electroshock -; a success that pushed her to publish it in 1969 The midday threada timely and magmatic account of his psychoanalysis.
Once the story with Citto Maselli is over, Goliarda begins season of creative hunger and loneliness. He has relationships – almost always platonic – including a brief encounter with Milan Kundera. And this loving fast is broken only with the encounter with Angelo Pellegrinoa literature professor twenty years younger, who supported her in the long genesis and writing of her masterpiece: The art of joy.
