Alba De Céspedes

Rome, Italy

Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (1911–1997) was a Cuban-Italian writer. She was the daughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (a Cuban ambassador to Italy) and his Italian wife, Laura Bertini y Alessandri.

De Céspedes worked as a journalist in the 1930s for Piccolo, Epoca, and La Stampa. In 1935, she wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri. Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity.

In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels, Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940), were banned. In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an agony column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca. She wrote the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1955 film Le Amiche. Although her books were bestsellers, De Céspedes remains overlooked in recent studies of Italian women writers.