A Girl Named Milena | Profile

I love alliteration in Italian names and surnames: Romano Romanelli, Graziano Graziani, Ottiero Ottieri, Giovanni Giovannini, Sergio Sergi, Milena Milani. Just the love of alliteration made me curious about the past year, I just found in the library a book of scandals that I had forgotten about, and its story (the story of the scandal, not the story of the book) tells a lot of stories about small things. As long as there are people (almost always the right) who care too much about the physical and mental health of others, while it is well known that others only care about happiness and happiness, then mankind will never be able to escape from its own suffering. If it is possible, no one will think about them. Being ignored is the best way to cross the valley of tears, because once noticed, the journey immediately becomes a flight.

Milena Milani’s novel La ragazza di nome Giulio (A Girl Called Giulio: Why Did They Change a Certain Article to an Uncertain Article?) was published in Italy in the spring of 1964, after it had been left unsold in bookstores. The edition was confiscated and the author prosecuted for offences against public decency. As always, all this promoted the novel (on the other hand, rather mediocre) in an exaggerated way: it was eventually translated into several languages, including Spanish, with an edition published by the Grijalbo label dating back to 1977. Written to Roser Berdagué (she is 95 years old and still alive. Greetings, Roser!), she was certainly not yet the infallible translator she later became, because she confused La letterascallatta (The Scarlet Letter) with The Scarlet Letter. (In Italian, “letter” and “letter” are the same word.) It doesn’t matter because Nathaniel Hawthorne has been dead for 113 years and won’t hold her accountable for libel. In any case, the translation did little to save Milena Milani’s book, and even if it was saved it was only because of the uproar it caused.

A Girl Called Julio tells the story of Jules, a young woman named after her father (hence the title), who freely explores in the first person her early adolescence until college years, giving herself over to various relationships, but always frustrating and unsatisfying. Milani died in 2013 and no one remembers her anymore. Her novels had been nominated for the Strega Prize, and when she was accused of indecency, several BroadCast Unitedlectuals, including the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, appeared in court to support her. She was sentenced to six months in prison (which she did not serve) and a fine. Years later, Milani said that A Girl Called Julio had been in her mind for fifteen years, but she had been afraid to write it because fifty years was not ideal for writing such a novel, as women had not yet enjoyed the possibility of writing freely. He then discovered that things had hardly changed in the mid-sixties, but it was too late.

He wrote the novel between 1961 and 1962, spending the winter isolated in Cortina near the Alps, and pitched it to several publishers, but they found the novel too horrible to publish. But he eventually found a publisher (a book always has a publisher, the problem is finding it) and sold 40,000 copies in the first six months. In February 1965, after a series of complaints from readers and Catholic associations, the government ordered the confiscation of all copies found in bookshops and a trial for the author, editor, and printer. In her defense, Milani claimed that the motive was related not only to the sex scenes she described, but also to the fact that she (the author) was a woman. Milani claimed that the book Un amor, written by Dino Buzzati, described similar scenes but did not suffer the same fate.

There was a movie based on this book in 1970. They can be found on YouTube. Don’t watch it.