Adelaide Bernardini, initially known by the pseudonym ‘Chimera’, was a poet, narrator, columnist, playwright, critic and librettist, among the best-known voices of Italian culture between the end of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century. His works, varied in themes and genres (theatre, fiction, journalism, poetry, works for children) were widely read and known, also because Bernardini, being part of Capuana’s entourage, was in contact with the major writers and publishers of the time (Treves, Sandron, Giannotta) and in personal relationships with Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Luigi Pirandello, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Matilde Serao, Amalia Guglielminetti, Grazia Deledda, etc. The first woman to hold ex cathedra conferences at the University of Catania, Bernardini collaborated with her husband Capuana on more than one occasion and was the inspiration, co-author and editor of his works.
Umbrian by birth but Sicilian by adoption, Adelaide Bernardini (Narni 1872 – Catania 1944) witnessed crucial years in the political, cultural and social history of Italy, from the post-unification period to the Second World War, which she recounted in poems, novels and theatrical texts, strengthened by her training as a teacher and fervent reader, driven by an iron ambition and, inevitably, corroborated by the fruitful cultural humus in which she found herself living thanks to her husband, residing first in Rome and then in Catania.
The notable age difference with Capuana, the feuilleton events from which their human and artistic partnership was born, the strong-willed and rather polemical character that put her in contrast with illustrious names of the intelligentsia of the period – Luigi Pirandello and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, among others – had not so far allowed a calm and objective evaluation of Bernardini’s work.
This unjust and arbitrary damnatio memoriae, together with the total inattention to her work, was remedied by the publication of Dora Marchese’s essay, “Adelaide Bernardini: the ‘chimera’ of literature” (Euno editions), published in the “Studi” series of the Foundation Verga of Catania. The substantial volume, which has the one-act Ammatula! as an appendix, places Adelaide Bernardini in the broader perspective of women’s writing between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, within the crucial debate on the themes of emancipationism: education, marriage, motherhood, divorce, adultery. Through a carefully documented biographical profile and a stringent analysis of her texts, Marchese objectively reconstructs the figure of Bernardini as a woman and intellectual.
