Ada Negri

Ada Negri (3 February 1870 – 11 January 1945) was an Italian poet and writer.

Ada Negri was born in Lodi, Italy into an artisan family to Giuseppe Negri and his wife Vittoria Cornalba. She attended Lodi’s Normal School for Girls and earned an elementary teacher’s diploma. At eighteen, she took a position as schoolteacher in the village of Motta Visconti, on the Ticino, near Pavia. Her first volume of lyrics, Fatalità, (1892) confirmed her reputation as a poet, and led to her appointment to the normal school at Milan. Her second book of poems, Tempeste (1896), tells the helpless tragedy of the forsaken poor.

On 28 March 1896, she married industrialist Giovanni Garlanda of Biella, who had fallen in love with her from reading her poetry. By 1904 they had daughters, Bianca and Vittoria. The latter died in infancy. In 1913, Negri separated from her husband and moved to Switzerland with Bianca. Afterwards, she often moved. She was a frequent visitor to Laglio on Lake Como, where she wrote her only novel, an autobiographical work, Stella Mattutina (Morning Star), published in 1921, and in English in 1930. During an extended stay on Capri that began in March 1923, she wrote I canti dell'isola.

She became the first woman member of the Italian Academy in 1940. That achievement, however, also stained her later reputation since members of the Academy had to swear loyalty to the Fascist regime and were rewarded by it with various material benefits. On 11 January 1945, her daughter Bianca found Negri dead in her studio in Milan. She was 74 years old.

Her work was widely translated during her lifetime, with individual poems published in newspaper in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The actress Pola Negri (born Barbara Apolonia Chałupec), adopted the stage surname "Negri" in emulation of the poet. The actress Paola Pezzaglia was the ideal interpreter of her poetry on stage.

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