Antonia Pozzi was born in Milan on 12th February 1912 to Roberto, a lawyer, and Countess Carolina Lavagna Sangiuliani di Gualdana.

She received a solid and rigorous education. As a teenager she began writing poetry, finding inspiration in the nature surrounding her beloved home in Pasturo, at the foot of the Grigne Mountains (LC), which was a place of refuge and peace for her.

Once she graduated from the ‘Alessandro Manzoni’ classical high school, she began a relationship with her Latin and Greek teacher, Antonio Maria Cervi, despite her family’s firm opposition.

Enrolled in the Faculty of Modern Philology at the University of Milan, she had the opportunity to get to know many intellectuals of her time, including Vittorio Sereni, who became a close friend of hers. In particular, during Antonio Banfi’s lectures on aesthetics, she came into contact with several philosophers, poets and publishers of the time, including Remo Cantoni, Enzo Paci, Maria Corti, Alberto Mondadori, Livio Garzanti and many others. Banfi’s influence proved so profound that under his guidance Pozzi graduated in 1935.

Despite his modern and progressive schooling and academic training, his path clashed with family expectations, still bound to the rigid traditional roles of upper-class society.

After finishing university, she devoted herself to sports and travelling, until she was called to teach at a technical institute, an experience she saw as a way to emancipate herself and break away from her family of origin.

However, the poor appreciation her poems received among her friends and her own professor fuelled a growing restlessness in her. Added to this was a bitter disappointment in love and the expatriation of friends forced to leave Italy due to the Racial Laws, thus aggravating her sense of isolation.

Overwhelmed by what she described as ‘mortal despair’, Antonia Pozzi chose to take her own life at the age of only twenty-six, on 3 December 1938, near Chiaravalle.

All of his poems were published posthumously: despite his discrete output during his lifetime, Pozzi never attempted publication. Due to the special circumstances of his death, his father considered it appropriate to rework some of his writings, to obscure the more personal and controversial passages, before agreeing to publication (1939).

The first full, uncensored publication by Onorina Dino dates back to 1989.

You can consult the death certificate on the Ancestors Portal: Archivio di Stato di Milano > Stato civile italiano > Milano > Registro 7440, Parte I (1587-1750), Registro 3

The original is kept at the State Archives in Milan

Antonia Pozzi’s personal archive and library are now preserved at the Insubric National Centre ‘Carlo Cattaneo’ and ‘Giulio Preti’.

For more on the figure of Antonia Pozzi, see the entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani edited by Sara Lorenzetti.