1903-1981
United States, Italy, Switzerland
Giuseppe Prezzolini
Writer, literary critic, academic, journalist, publisher
Goffredo Parise
Writer, journalist, playwright, poet
Gioconda Savini played a crucial role in a major academic hub of transatlantic transfers: the Casa italiana at Columbia University. Savini was the Casa's secretary from 1930 to the early Sixties, when she moved to Italy with her companion, Giuseppe Prezzolini. She collaborated with the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux as a reader and a translator, and she carefully curated relationships with the publisher both for herself and Prezzolini. She allowed the early translation in English of Goffredo Parise's first work, among others.
An in-depth analysis of archival sources and published materials shows that Savini was indeed a cultural actor, despite the title of secretary might give the impression that her career was distant from literary and scholarly matters.
In 1944 Harry Morgan Ayres, who was directing the Casa Italiana, proposed Savini for career advancement stating that "She has been at the Casa Italiana from the beginning and in a very real sense is the Casa Italiana. In addition to her many duties as a secretary she [...] carries on extensive and valuable research in support of the various projects of the Casa. She is in short a scholar in her own right" (Ragusa, p. 43). Unfortunately, though, Savini had arrived too early at the Casa Italiana for working there as a scholar: Columbia tenured its first female faculty member in 1937, and would see organised protests denouncing discrimination against hiring women as faculty only in 1969.
Prezzolini’s published diaries testify that Savini’s work was crucial for allowing the incredible pace at which Prezzolini published his books and journal articles; she helped Prezzolini constantly, until her death in 1981.
Archival research is in progress, and shall offer a more comprehensive picture of Gioconda Savini's activity in the years to come.
Related Vectors
Goffredo Parise
Writer, journalist, playwright, poet
Giuseppe Prezzolini
Writer, literary critic, academic, journalist, publisher
Sources
Pellizzato, Giulia. Prezzolini e Parise: un'amicizia transoceanica. Edizione critica e commentata del carteggio (1951-1976). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2021.
Pellizzato, Giulia. “Like Needle and Thread. How Women Connected Italy to America at the House of Farrar, Straus.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020. Nicola Wilson, Claire Battershill, Sophie Heywood, Marrisa Joseph, Daniela La Penna, Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Elizabeth Willson Gordon (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, pp. 439-454.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe. Diario 1900-1941. Milan: Rusconi, 1978.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe. Diario 1942-1968. Milan: Rusconi, 1981.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe. Diario 1968-1982. Milan: Rusconi, 1999.
Ragusa, Olga. “Giuseppe Prezzolini professore universitario a New York.” In Giuseppe Prezzolini testimone della sua epoca (1882-1982). Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 1992.
Ragusa, Olga. “Quando gli archivi parlano.” In Giuseppe Prezzolini: The American Years 1929–1962, Silvia Betocchi (ed.). New York: S. F. Vanni/Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, 1994, pp. 39-62.
Ragusa, Olga. Gli anni americani di Giuseppe Prezzolini: il Dipartimento d'italiano e la Casa Italiana della Columbia University. Florence: Le Monnier, 2001.
‘Women at Columbia’, ed. by Robert A. McCaughey <http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_ events/symposia/history_women_timeline.html> [accessed 2 January 2022].