MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS AND FAMILY IN GOLIARDA SAPIENZA’S L’ARTE DELLA GIOIA SUSANNA SCARPARO AND AURELIANA DI ROLLO Monash University, Australia This article discusses Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia, which many Italian critics have hailed as the new Gattopardo. The novel was written over nine years, from 1967 to 1976, but for over two decades Sapienza failed to find a publisher. Two years after the author’s death in 1996, the small publisher Stampa Alternativa printed 1,000 copies of the novel. Ten year later, L’arte della gioia Gioia was published in Germany and France where it enjoyed instant success. As a result of this success abroad, Sapienza’s novel finally gained full recognition and public acclaim in Italy, where it was re-published by Einaudi in 2008. In this article, we argue that through the deconstruction of male and female gendered roles, L’arte della gioia gioia articulates an unconventional deconstruction and reconstruction of the Italian family and the role of the mother within it. In so doing, Sapienza proposes unconventional mother–daughter bonds based on the recognition of maternal authority. KEYWORDS: mother–daughter relationship, Goliarda Sapienza, authority, Italian feminist thought, motherhood Hailed by many as the new Gattopardo, Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia (The Art of Joy, 2008) is arguably one of the most intriguing literary discoveries of the past decade. 1 The almost seven-hundred-page novel is both a bildungsroman, following the female protagonist’s quest for freedom from her early childhood until her seventies, and an attempt to challenge culturally constructed gendered roles based on traditional understandings of family and kinship. Like the protagonist of her novel, Goliarda Sapienza (1924–1996) was an unusual figure. Her mother, Maria Giudice, was a prominent protagonist of the Italian left and the first woman to lead a trade union, becoming the editor of the newspaper Il grido del popolo in 1916. 2 Her father, Giuseppe Sapienza, was a socialist lawyer and an antifascist activist. Goliarda was their only biological child in a broad extended family that included the seven children Maria had from a previous relationship and whom Goliarda considered as her brothers and sisters. Goliarda (whose name was chosen by her anticlerical father, who did not want a saint’s name for his child) grew up in Sicily in an unconventional environment and was educated at home. At the age of sixteen she won a scholarship to the The Italianist, 35. 1, 91–106, February 2015 # Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Reading 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0261434014Z.000000000109