Alda Merini

Italian writer, a poet. nominated by the Academie Française for a Nobel prize. With a precocious talent in poetry, Merini published her first group of verse in 1953. She married Ettore Carniti, a baker and they had two daughters.

After the birth of her second child, Merini has a serious nervous breakdown and was institutionalized off and on for the following 15 years, during which time she was given 57 electric shock treatments. Between one recovery of depression and another, she had two more daughters who were taken away, like the first two. Left a widow in 1981, she was remarried in 1983 to a doctor-poet older than she and was widowed for a second time.