L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 www.italoamericano.org 14 L'Italo-Americano blocking train shipments to Rockwell Corporation's Rocky Flats plutonium enrichment plant near Boulder, Colorado, she wanted to be arrested for demon- strating solidarity with her friend. She spoke of Ginsberg as a man who had found peace and bal- ance thanks to Buddhism, unlike Kerouac, "the most suffering man I have ever known." Nanda was a nonconformist, a radical, but kept repeating that she had had a "Victorian" educa- tion that she never rebelled against. But she urged others to do so. Her grandfather was a Scot who founded the Italian branch of the Berlitz School of Lan- guages. Born in Genoa on 18 July 1917, she studied at a prestigious Swiss boarding school before enrolling at the Massimo D'Azeglio classical studies high school in Turin. In 1937, both Nanda and her schoolmate, the future novelist Primo Levi, didn't pass the Maturità, or final exams for high school. Their compositions were described as "unsuitable." Strangely, the two future literary icons had to repeat a school year. But in high school, Nanda was lucky to have a special teacher of comparative literature, Cesare Pavese. The great Italian novelist and poet used to visit her. "When he came home, he knew I kept my Macedonia ciga- rettes in one of my desk draw- ers," she said. "One day, while looking for cigarettes, he opened the wrong drawer and found my Italian translation of Spoon River Anthology by the American Edgar Lee Masters. It was purely a writing exercise," she said. But Pavese was so enthusiastic about it that it took it to the Einaudi publishing house. Pavese called her "gôgnin," a Turinese term that means cute face. He urged her to "study, study, study" and was "as jealous of her as a gorilla," he wrote in a letter to her, because she was already in love with Italian archi- tect and designer Ettore Sottsass. She and Ettorino remained mar- ried for 25 years. She was a lady: faithful and loyal to him. But he was instead a womanizer. And she suffered. One day, she told me: "You poor girl, you will suffer too if you behave as I did", a trace of cynicism in her tone of voice. "Men value more women who behave like prostitutes," she said. That theme was one of the leit- motifs of her autobiographical novel, Che cos'è più la Virtù. I recall she was shining when in 1997 Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche gave her a safe haven for her vast archival mate- rial that today is located at the Fondazione Corriere della Sera. I saw her eyes sparkle, her lips lift in a slow smile, during our last conversation at her final home at Piazzetta della Guastal- la. Nanda beamed with bliss before greeting me with a request: "Let's go and chant a sutra to the Buddha." His statue was sitting still in a medicine pose in a hallway near the front door.  Continued from page 12 Fernanda Pivano with Gregory Corso, Milan, 1960. Photo by Ettore Sottsass, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, at Fondazione Corriere della Sera Fernanda Pivano with Jack Kerouac, Milan 1966. Photo by Ettore Sott- sass, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, at Fondazione Corriere della Sera LIFE PEOPLE PLACES HERITAGE Fernanda Pivano with Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Paris, 1961. Photo by Ettore Sottsass, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricer- che, at Fondazione Corriere della Sera

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