She had a light-footed groove and strayed back and forth between classical meters and everyday observations like a Roman cat: the poetess Patrizia Cavalli, a small, plump person who recited her texts by heart, swayed to the rhythm of her verses and regularly carried her audience away at festivals . “Fresco of the night of divers/ lost in the enclosure of roles/ that confine the actor, word housing,/ hunger and longing pit at two o’clock/ in the afternoon, the hour in between/ that is prayerless and suspects nothing/ but strangely toils behind the immensity,” she chanted and reached editions of over 5000 pieces.
Born in Todi in 1947, Cavalli escaped the provinces and went to Rome. Her mixture of cheeky curiosity and shyness made an impression on the writer Elsa Morante: Patrizia Cavalli picked up her celebrated older colleague for lunch almost every day.
Morante helped her make her debut in 1974 with the renowned Einaudi publishing house in Turin. “My poems will not change the world” was the title of the volume, which was followed by seven more, often several years apart. Her texts revolve around small epiphanies and are attempts to reach another dimension of time. But despite the references to Giuseppe Ungaretti’s scarcity, Patrizia Cavalli did not continue the line of Italian hermeticism, but continued the narrative tradition of Umberto Saba and Sandro Penna. On June 21, 2022, the poet died, who knew absences so well: “I lose myself / on the way, fall apart day after day / and every return is in vain”.