Claudia Durastanti is a Rome-based author whose recently-published novel, MissItalia, tells the story of the Italian South in three parts. Part One tells the lives of brigantesse, the female brigands who lived outside the law during the years of Italian Unification; Part Two targets the lives of Southern Italians during the post-war Boom Era; Part Three narrates a lunar colony where migrants from the South attempt to eke out an existence amid scarcity of resources and inequalities that mirror those on Earth. I sat down with her to discuss the unique challenges of historical-fiction writing, the enduring ways in which Southern Italy is mythologized in the Anglosphere, and the ways in which collective memory must be renegotiated in order to imagine a different future that transcends the injustices of the past.
Can you describe where you’re from and the hybrid way you were raised?
I was born in Brooklyn in 1984 to an Italian American family. My grandparents were from the South, so they didn’t have much access to standard Italian. They spoke what I call a “black-market language,” a made-up Italian of Southern dialect from Lucania. My linguistic upbringing was further complicated by my deaf parents, who wouldn’t use sign language, so we had to come up with creative solutions and this was a strong influence. This is how I came to Italian and to English. I think it’s important to stress the fact that both languages were already “cracked” from the very beginning. When I moved to Italy when I was six, I went to public school. What happened to me is what often happens to children of migration. You try to fit into the language that you’re learning in a very standard way. I was an early and quick reader of Italian. And so English became a sort of—I wouldn’t say clandestine language, but a seasonal language for me. I would visit my family in the states, and go back to it, but although I read it and I consider myself bilingual, I was never formally trained in English. It’s something that I got from my family line, from literature, and from sharing it with my brother, but it was mostly a secret between me and him. We would speak it around a town where no one spoke English. Also, nobody spoke Italian. It was dialect. So, from the very start, I was influenced by the official language on the surface, the clandestine language, and the black-market language. And often I was puzzled when asked about what language I felt more comfortable in because I thought it was obviously a sort of in-between language. This is why I started, after openly meditating on linguistic influence in Strangers I Know, to consider myself at home in English translation. To further clarify, I feel myself at home in English translated into Italian. The major influence on my style the Italian translation of American novels. I respond a lot to Italian authors who have been translators: Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg. Currently the strongest influences for me are Italian authors who translate as a main job or side job.
How does your background in Anthropology inform your fiction?
I grew up thinking I would study languages in college. I sensed that I wanted to be a fiction writer, but in Italy we don’t have MFAs. There is no trained educational path to become a writer, at least when I was studying. I always thought it was the spontaneous curse of my life to study languages or comparative literature. Then at one point I became obsessed with identity, but more in terms of the underground. I have a column in Italian music right now, and I always worked in music magazines. I was really drawn to figuring out why adolescents would use certain aesthetic codes to signify their marginality compared with the rest of society. I know it sounds naïve, but I enrolled in Anthropology because I wanted to find out why punks were using safety pins in their ears. I was looking for how we make mythologies out of the recent past. I was more drawn not by faraway places, but by marginalities that are close to home, to how you mythologize your youth, your class, etc. That was the starting point, but I also think that my unconscious move was trying to understand what you would consider a “bomb” of stereotypes related to my own identity: I was a migrant, the daughter of a deaf woman, I grew up working class, we had no family in the South, my mother had forms of mental illnesses. I’ve been exposed to labelling and classification all my life. I enrolled in Anthropology because I wanted professors to tell me it was all a bunch of lies. And then I remember that my first day in college, my teacher said something that would affect my future as a writer: after these classes, you’re going to learn that it’s true that Neapolitans are likely to steal, or that Germans are very rigid, or that in Rome there’s bad traffic. I was so upset, and I wanted to get my fee back because I didn’t want to hear about that stuff. But it was interesting to realize that stereotypes have a kind of positive affective manipulation in terms of affection of stereotypes by your own self. I think my Italian American family did a lot of that, whether they knew it or not: using the stereotype as a survival tool, as some role that you can disguise in. That affected me a lot in a personal way, and in a way that I craft characters and write about communities.
Can you expand on the impact of Carlo Levi on your work?
I was raised in town that is literally in between Aliano, the town there Levi was confined (he changed the name to Galiano), and then another town called Montemurro where you had Leornardo Sinisgalli. He was an engineer and poet who worked with Pirelli, a visionary, a completely different interpreter of post-war Italy. I was on the cusp of these two things, both literally and in landscape terms. You have this very rarefied desertic area described by Levi and you have the wilderness on the other side. I think it’s interesting, when you are first faced with the representation of the town or the state or the area you were born in, in fiction. When you start reading short stories and seeing documentaries or films about the place you come from, it’s kind of like when you grow up and you realize your family is messier than you think. Of course, the major representation of Lucania is in Christ Stopped at Eboli. When I moved from the South and studied abroad, I would say I’m from Lucania, and people would reference that text, which made me roll my eyes. I realized that it had such a hold on collective perception, even sixty years after publication. I started unpacking the genre when I was a young girl in school because they forced us to read it. They presented it to us as an historical document. It was a representation of this town, of its dynamics, of this agrarian civilization outside of history. Although it was a very loving tribute, it upset me because it contains Carlo Levi’s own memories. The book came out nine years after the experience of confinement, so there is a time lapse in between experience and writing. In nine years, your memory will change, and you can’t rely on the preciseness of anything. So, to me, it’s a beautiful work of literary nonfiction. But it was presented as an historical document, and the poetics of it, as a literary artifact, were really downplayed. I think Carlo Levi was a very strong writer, and I think his work has been essentialized. It’s lived on more as a document on folklore.
The first part of MissItalia is historical. How did you research that section?
I call it a falso storico, because I was trying to unpack or deconstruct certain ideas. I didn’t feel it was in my immediate interest as a writer to work on immersive historical fiction. I discarded that path because I was really thinking about the deterioration of documents, archives, and materials. I was helped by the subject I was researching, in the sense that you won’t find a lot of accounts of brigantesse, women who were involved in rebel movements in Lucania and in the South in general, starting from 1860 up until the Repressions, 1864-65. You would find a lot of photographs. We are in the early days of photography, so they were staged. I write about that. These girls, these women, were dressed up, not in their own clothes. It was propaganda either to help catch them or used for pedagogical purposes against deviant and violent behavior. I benefitted from this lack of sources because I thought it was a free space to roam around. I tried to write, and then check, verify, which is something that you don’t do in a traditional historical novel. Good, historical novels unload all the research in a very light way. You don’t want to read an encyclopedia. There is a risk, because you want to be informed, but then it’s going to affect symbols, metaphors, and the lyrical finesse of language. It’s very hard to transform historical research into something lighter. Mainly, I was curious about when you first had these collective representations of Southern teenagers. I described them in the first part of MissItalia: they always have these jelly-black eyes, they always have a golden cross, and I was really fascinated by the icons of rebel southern teenagers. I wrote about it, and then I found photos by accident, and the scene was with the rebel women. To me, having this sort of proof after speculative fact was interesting because it allowed me to handle history more as a dream. The more you go on into the novel, the closer you get to the 50s and the 60s and the future, the more the future is handled as an historical fact. To me, past is handled more as a dream and future is handled more as history. This is true for this specific project and in general, for me.
Were there any major influences for the second section, which takes place during the postwar period?
The second part is told in first person because it is a conversation with certain ghosts. So, in disguise, you could have anyone, including Ernesto de Martino, Carlo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Antonioni, Pierpaolo Passolini. The Italian Boom, the years after World War II, were foundational in many ways and were very mysterious and opaque to me because I was born in 1984. We were basically raised in the Post-Everthing era: Post-Art, Post-Rock, Post-History. I was really thinking about Antonioni—he’s a very literary director—and his adaption of Tre donne sole by Cesare Pavese. Also, a specific style of Italian cinema, that is episode films from the 50s. When I saw them as a child, I was always intrigued by stories that took place in the same city, let’s say Rome, but you had a switch of characters. The relationships between the characters were not necessarily immediate at first, so you had to deliver a story where you had no evident cause and effect. Then in the 80s, it became a very commercial genre, cinema episodi, and you had a bunch of cheap Christmas episode movies from the Vanzina brothers, not worth much. But at the beginning I thought it was mysterious, so I was trying to reference that a little. If you ask me what genre MissItalia is, I will say, it’s a romazo episodi structured on i film episodi from the 1950s.
The inequalities that exist on earth get mirrored in the third section of the novel. Are these inequalities inevitable?
I was moving more out of an existential perspective. How do you survive radical change? At the beginning, everybody felt that MissItalia was going to be a feminist historical novel with an ecological purpose, and it failed massively. I realized that although it handles these themes, I was really moving from the idea of, how do we get rid of this affective attachment to toxicity? This maybe can extend to inequality. Would it be entirely impossible that, if you had to restart civilization on the moon, it would be so implausible to think that at least in the first stages of this new civilization, you would have to provide a certain mirroring or familiarity in order to survive and adapt? I thought that it was a practical device, this speculative proposal. But at the same time, it’s dark in the sense that you end up having this community on the moon dealing with the escapism that we often encounter on a personal basis. In the past, I wrote a lot about moving to other cities, migration, so in a way it was extending that kind of malaise to interstellar migrants. The whole third part deals with what is necessary to give up in terms of collective memory to start again. There is a struggle in giving up what we think of as inequalities. We need an open and honest conversation of what we feed on and who we exploit. We live in an unequal system, most of us agree with that. But still, what’s the co-morbidity we have with a system that’s structured like that? I think it was interesting for me, both in terms of social analysis and novels, to deal with what we lack in equality and toxicity, so the characters openly talk about it in the end. Is it right to give up on memory if it helps us to start from scratch? And you see it today. I wrote MissItalia in times of Covid and war. If you think of what’s happening right now, particularly what’s happening in Gaza, you have a huge debate on what memory of the past we must give up in order to process a new memory. We are not these perfect machines and devices that can hold the two moments together. Something has to go. This is my conclusion. The third part deals with how it is difficult to let go of things when we’ve been trained as humans to remember as much as we can. This is an active obstacle to imagining new forms of co-existence.
What is one thing that you want Anglophones to understand about Southern Italy that you feel gets misunderstood?
I’ve been dealing with a lot of academic departments of Italian Studies in the States. I recently had a keynote at AIAS. I also recently read a book called Living the Revolution by Jennifer Guglielmo. When I started to publish and when I was first translated into English, a question I would always ask is, where are the Italian American women writers? There are tons of stereotypes, and they all go back to the Italian South. They were handling the domestic environment, they were raising families, they were the leaders in their households but not explicitly so. Then you read this book and you find out that a lot of women were unionizing, they were exporting forms of rebellion and revolt that they practiced in Southern Italy first, in Sicily, Puglia, and Basilicata, and so this was something that happened historically. The way Anglophones struggle with the Italian South is also the way that Northerners, in Northern Europe and Italy, struggle with the South as well. They share this kind of top-down approach, I would say even this sort of explorer-colonialist view because the South was in many ways and still is a factory producing goods that are always in demand. If you need goods in terms of tradition, authenticity, the myth of the magical land, the myth of the land where nothing changes—this sort of escapist, nostalgic, essentialist idea, this land of wonders, as much as it is obscure and poor and corrupted—you need it to be stable. I think sometimes the Anglophone gaze is really conspiring to keep the South that way. Also, in touristic terms, I think there is a little disorientation in realizing that a lot of Southern Italians have a strategic and playful manipulation of this naïve desire from the outside. I was reading, for an upcoming talk on her, Notes on the South by Joan Didion. In 1970 she went to the Gulf—Mississippi, Louisiana—and she wrote, I thought I was coming here to understand the West or understand the past, but I realize I’m dealing with the future of the United States. Anglophones struggle to realize that the South of Italy is a laboratory of the future, rather than a mythical land of the past. You have to be very creative in order to imagine life in certain areas.
Regarding the title of the book, MissItalia. Do you think that there is a thematic link between nostalgia and femininity?
There is a line by Rosi Braidotti where she describes the male subject saying, Mancano di una mancanza—they miss missing. As a young girl and woman, I was always exposed to this idea of longing and missing and lacking. Setting aside the classical Freudian studies about it, I think it was a privilege to be constantly exposed to incomplete scenarios and uncertain understandings of reality. I think it gives marginal subjects in general but especially women, almost an antidote to craft, to stories or theories that are too rounded. For these female characters in the novel, I wanted to avoid being too ambiguous, elusive. I think it’s cheesy to say that a character is always ambiguous, that there’s no threshold between good and evil, that we’re constantly good and evil at the same time. I think sometimes it’s laziness when you don’t want to craft a character that handles the real consequences of certain choices. At the same time, I wanted to avoid a female character that is too assertive. I didn’t want them to drive the action in a conspiring way. I didn’t want them to be mobile depositories of certainties. I was trying to avoid both things. This is why the idea of missing is so important, because it becomes an existential frame. I wanted to make it a little more complicated because we are witnessing the birth of a nation. We are witnessing the first time that a certain South becomes visible to the world. Another way to think about missing, is as when you miss a target, for example. As a woman you’re often trained to think that if you’re missing the target, there’s failure. You’re not accomplishing all your skill, all your talent, you’re not taking advantage of your education, your empowerment. Although I’m a little nauseated by empowered female characters in novels as a reaction to women as victims, I think that idea of missing something is a form of freedom because it defies the idea that as women, in order to achieve some sort of autonomy, you must be focused on the target. That’s an understanding of feminism that I don’t respond to.
MissItalia is available from La nave di Teseo editore. The English translation is forthcoming in 2025 from Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Summit Books in the US.
Claudia Durastanti is the author of five novels. She has translated Elizabeth Hardwick, Joshua Cohen, and Donna Haraway into Italian and writes for several literary supplements. Strangers I Know (Premio Strega Off in 2019, Pen Translates Award) has been translated into 21 languages. Missitalia (La Nave di Teseo, Premio Mondello 2024) will be published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Summit in the US. She currently lives in Rome and curates the feminist imprint La Tartaruga. Twitter: @CDurastanti.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, The Dodge, La Piccioletta Barca, The Dodge, and on her Substack. Twitter: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 