Anna Maria Ortese, Le piccole persone, 2016

Several times in her public speeches, Anna Maria Ortese denounced man’s crimes ‘against the Earth’, his ‘culture of arrogance’, his attitude as master and torturer ‘of every soul of Life’. And he did so even in the knowledge that his cry of alarm would be greeted with impatient condescension by those who seem to be unaware that what makes man worthy of survival is his ‘moral structure: meaning by moral any invisible relationship, but a good relationship, with universal life’. What we were unaware of was that such interventions, which pointed to the exploitation and slaughter of animals, to the offended and destroyed nature as our greatest sin, were not isolated and intentional stances, but rather the emerging tip of an iceberg. An iceberg represented by dozens and dozens of unpublished writings, in which Ortese deposited with touching tenacity what her ‘deep conscience’ dictated to her, that is to say, the memory, reserved for the few and supremely unpopular, ‘of the “first things” that pre-existed the universe’ – in other words, the vision that inhabited her. Writings of which a calibrated selection is offered here and which, as a whole, take the form of a veritable treatise on the only religion to which Ortese was stubbornly faithful: the religion of fraternity with nature.