Alba Florio (21 April 1910 – 31 May 2011) was an Italian poet, the last belonging to the

Decadentism The Decadent movement (Fr. ''décadence'', “decay”) was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The Decadent movement first flourished ...

current.

Life

Alba Florio was born on 21 April 1910 in Scilla and grew up in

Calabria , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , demographics1_title2 ...

, soaking up its traditions and its ways of thinking and putting everything in verses since her teenage years. Her introverted nature and the fact that she lived in a tiny village in Calabria kept her away from all the cultural and editorial circles, which led to poor diffusion of her work. When ''Estasi e preghiere'' (1929), her first poetry collection, came out, very few people noticed the young poet. The old poet Vincenzo Gerace, that shared her Calabrian origin, was one of the few who did notice wrote an ode about her. ''Oltremorte (1936)'' was the last of Alba's hermetic works. In her writing, she was heavily influenced by

Giovanni Pascoli Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli (; 31 December 1855 – 6 April 1912) was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the great ...

, echoed the dramatic tones of

Giuseppe Ungaretti Giuseppe Ungaretti (; 8 February 1888 – 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experim ...

and opened herself to Salvatore Quasimodo's new propositions: in those years, Quasimodo was living in Messina and

Reggio Calabria Reggio di Calabria ( scn, label= Southern Calabrian, Riggiu; el, label= Calabrian Greek, Ρήγι, Rìji), usually referred to as Reggio Calabria, or simply Reggio by its inhabitants, is the largest city in Calabria. It has an estimated popul ...

. With ''Oltremorte'' Alba won the "Maria Enrica Viola" poetry prize. In her two last collections, ''Troveremo il pane sconosciuto'' (1939) and ''Come mare a riva'' (1956), existential pessimism is deeply present and largely explored. «Vegliamo la tempesta / crocifissi alle rocce / albatri dagli occhi viola» («We watch over the storm / crucified to the rocks / Purple-eyed albatri»). The same themes represent in many of Lorenzo Calogero lyrics, born in the same years and place as Alba. Alba died on 31 May 2011 in

Messina Messina (, also , ) is a harbour city and the capital of the Italian Metropolitan City of Messina. It is the third largest city on the island of Sicily, and the 13th largest city in Italy, with a population of more than 219,000 inhabitants in ...

. She was 100 years old.

Collections

* ''Estasi e preghiere'', Messina, 1929. * ''Oltremorte'', Milano, I.T.E., 1936. * ''Troveremo il paese sconosciuto'', Modena, Guanda, 1939. * ''Come mare a riva'', Messina, 1956. * ''Ultima striscia di cielo'', Cosenza, Pellegrini, 2000 (introduction by Antonio Piromalli).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Floria, Alba 1910 births 2011 deaths People from Scilla, Calabria 20th-century Italian poets Women centenarians Italian centenarians