Early life Sapienza was born on 10 May 1924 in
Catania, Sicily, to (1880–1953) and (1880–1949). Giudice, a prominent journalist originally from
Lombardy, was a feminist activist as well as a prominent member of the
Italian Socialist Party who had been repeatedly imprisoned for her beliefs. Giudice collaborated with national and international left-wing intellectuals, including
Angelica Balabanoff,
Antonio Gramsci,
Lenin, and
Umberto Terracini. She had many step-siblings from her parents’ previous families who lived together in the same house in Via Pistone, Catania. Giudice was at one time the manager of the Italian Marxist philosopher
Antonio Gramsci at the newspaper
Grido del Popolo; Gramsci had acted as a babysitter to Sapienza's older siblings. Sapienza spent her childhood in a non-conformist feminist anti-fascist and anti-clerical environment, where she was exposed to a mix of different class backgrounds and to active political involvement. Since her father did not want her to be indoctrinated by the fascist propaganda of the Mussolini regime she was removed from the formal school system when she was 14 and home-schooled. In 1964 she made a second suicide attempt. by publishers because of its length (over 700 pages) and its portrayal of a woman unrestrained by conventional morality and traditional feminine roles. It detailed a woman's pursuit of cultural, financial and sexual independence in early 20th-century Sicily, during which she sleeps with both men and women, commits incest and murders a nun. She was unable to find a publisher for it during her lifetime. One rejected it as "a pile of iniquity". In 1979 she married the writer and actor Angelo Pellegrino (born 1946), who was 22 years her junior, an act that was regarded as scandalous. in
Rebibbia prison.
Posthumous success In 1998, her husband Angelo Pellegrino financed the full publication of 1,000 copies of ''L'arte della gioia'' by Stampa Alternativa. A few years later he sent some copies to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the novel was noticed by a German editor, who believed it to be a forgotten masterpiece and arranged for it to be published in Germany. The success of its French, German and Spanish editions earned Sapienza comparisons to D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal. two collections of poems,
Siciliane (which is in
Sicilian dialect) and
Ancestrale; the short story
Elogio del bar; a selection of thoughts taken from the writer's diaries, collected in the volumes
Il vizio di parlare a me stessa and
La mia parte di gioia; a collection of plays and cinema subjects,
Tre pièces e soggetti cinematografici; and lastly the novel
Appuntamento a Positano. ==Memorials==