Amelia Rosselli, un canto nel suo spazio

The daughter of the anti-fascist exile Carlo Rosselli and the British Labour activist Marion Cave, Amalia Rosselli is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Her life story unfolds across geographical and linguistic borders, weaving together diverse cultural contexts and a rigorous musical training (as an organist, ethnomusicologist and composer) shaped within the European postwar avant-garde.

The project dedicated to her by the MACRO museum, in collaboration with RAI Radio 3, presents her poetic work through her own voice. Her singular and unique diction, bearing the marks of multiple languages and worlds, emerges from the readings and excerpts taken from the program “Con l’ascia dietro le spalle. Dieci anni senza Amelia Rosselli”, a broadcast produced by Radio3 in 2006 to mark the tenth anniversary of her passing. The editing, free of interpretative intervention, restores the full force of Rosselli’s vocal presence through recordings made between the 1980s and 1990s. Rosselli’s voice does not illustrate the text but re-creates it in the moment of performance, transforming poetry into an acoustic event.

From 29 June onward, the listening program is devoted to a complete reading of the long poem “Impromptu” (1981). The title itself evokes the musical form of improvisation, at once free and rigorously structured, reflecting the way language organizes itself according to an inner rhythm. Recorded by Rosselli herself, for a new edition published in 1993, the reading fully embodies her musical training. Here the voice emerges as the central protagonist, shaping an immersive space in which poetic language unfolds as an experience that is both meditative and radical.