City pictures Milan, Rome, Naples in Lente scura by Anna Maria Ortese

The following article examines the travel writings of Lente scura by Anna Maria Ortese (2004 Adelphi Edition). It focuses on three cities which had a profound impact on the writer: Milan, Rome and Naples. The various journal pieces from the late forties and fifties are interconnected by the desire to provide the reader a wide perspective on the social, cultural and even political reality of those times. Therefore, a distinctive register of Realism is used in a visionary style, sometimes with an ironic spirit of misery and nobility of Italy, from north to south.