Toward the end of March 1923, the Italian writer Ada Negri, who already had an international reputation for her frank and passionate poetry, enjoyed a brief holiday in Sicily. From there she went to the island of Capri, where she stayed for about a year and wrote "Songs of the Island." Her lyrics of Capri, full of sun, blueness and the perfume of oriental roses, are like a seashell: magical, polyphonic in their infinite melodiousness. These poems represent a sort of parenthesis in Negri's work. They are the result of the blinding light of the island, the ardor of a holiday both physical and...

Ada Negri, the author of ten volumes of poetry who enjoyed an international reputation for her frank and passionate writing, had a tormented love affair with a man whose life was cut short by premature death. She translated this experience into "The Book of Mara," in essence one long poem arising from a woman's most intimate place as if in a visceral scream - a most passionate expression of love, loss and redemption. Written with unusual frankness, especially in view of Italian society of the time, "The Book of Mara," along with "Songs of the Island," is considered the high point of Negri's...