Many scholars agree that Paola Masino’s novel Nascita e morte della massaia is to be read as an allegory protesting Fascism censorship and suppression of women’s creative powers, a sort of literal grave-stone and defeat of the possibility of feminine imagination and creativity. By focusing on the implications of the alimentary discourse in the novel and on its “anorexic” protagonist, my essay wishes to complement the former reading. I suggest that an additional, perhaps less dramatic and tragic message may stem out of this depiction of a failure and a defeat. That is, a message that alludes to a fundamental faith in the resiliency of the powers of imagination and artistic creativity may actually, although marginally, be traced in the novel.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cesaretti, E., (2025), "Nutrition as Dissolution: Paola Masino's Nascita e morte della massaia", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Cesaretti, Enrico. "Nutrition as Dissolution: Paola Masino's Nascita e morte della massaia." Quaderni d'italianistica 28 (2): 2009. 143-162. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v28i2.8525. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.