This article analyses Marisa Madieri’s narrative with particular attention to its stylistic traits. It focuses on her autobiographical style, characterized by nostalgia and—at the same time—a puzzling and enchanting detachment. Madieri’s writing closely looks at the earthly and the physical world from ground level in its minute and marginal aspects, while, at the same time, consistently transcending it. The interplay of memory and farewell, lightly but tenaciously woven into the narrative, informs it with a vertical and metaphysical perspective. Lightness and precision constitute the stylistic elements of her prose, and can be detected in her account of the exodus from post-war Yugoslavia, as well as in her floral fable “La radura,” or in the meditative space of her “La conchiglia.”

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Pellegrini, E., (2025), "The Transparencies of Marisa Madieri: Autobiography as Farewell", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Pellegrini, Ernestina. "The Transparencies of Marisa Madieri: Autobiography as Farewell." Quaderni d'italianistica 32 (1): 2011. 49-64. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v32i1.15934. 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/.