I admit that, though I often find myself asking in interviews with different young designers who is their favourite icon of style, sometimes the words ‘style icon’ make me cringe quite a bit.
My cringing is mainly derived from the fact that too many people out there identify icons of style in terms of beauty, clothes or accessories.
Yet I do prefer icons of style endowed with other gifts, from innate elegance to a bright and beautiful mind or a rare intelligence. One example is Alda Merini, the Italian poet who died on Sunday 1st November in her native Milan where today the state funerals are going to be celebrated (at the Duomo).
Merini was 78 and lived in Milan’s Navigli district. Though mainly known in Italy and considered as one of the country’s finest 20th century poets, she had reached out with her powerful works – dealing with themes as wide and different as eroticism, religion, mysticism, mental health and social issues – to other countries as well and a few of her anthologies are also available in English (check out A Rage of Love, Unpaid Ballads and The Holy Land).
Alda Merini was born in Milan on 21st March 1931, her father was an insurance officer and her mother a housewife. The middle child of three with an older sister and younger brother, Alda was a passionate piano player and writer.
She wrote her first poems when she was just 15, but she became more acquainted with the local literary scene in 1947 when Angelo Romanò and Giacinto Spagnoletti first read her works.
In the same year she started visiting quite often Spagnoletti’s house where she met other writers, yet 1947 was also a traumatic year for her since she also started having the first mental health problems and spent a month in a clinic.
Her first poems appeared in anthologies in the early 50s and, in 1953, she got married to Ettore Carniti, who owned a few bakeries in Milan, and released her first poetry anthology, La presenza di Orfeo. Further anthologies followed, but, from the 60s Alda Merini disappeared from the literary scene: from 1965 to 1972 she was indeed hospitalised in a mental health clinic, and started writing again only in 1979 when she set to work on what is unanimously considered her masterpiece, La Terra Santa (The Holy Land), that tackles themes such as mental health issues through her intense writing.
After her husband died, Merini became a friend of poet Michele Pierri, who was thirty years younger than her. They got married in 1983 and, since then, she began writing again, experimenting also with prose and writing a moving diary in which she told the story of her illness.
Moving back to Milan in 1986, Merini released further anthologies of poems and prose and, six years ago, Einaudi published a documentary and a book entitled Più bella della poesia è stata la mia vita, that literally in English translates as "My life was even more beautiful than my poetry".
I think this title is incredibly meaningful and definitely proves Merini is a genuine icon of style. I guess that, in her place, not many of us would display the same strength, love and passion for life she had.
She will be greatly missed especially in Italy, but we are very lucky since she left us with an amazing heritage and a bibliography that will enrich her readers for years to come.
Alda Merini will be buried in the Tempio della Gloria at Milan's Cimitero Monumentale (Monumental Graveyard).
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