page_title: Alda Merini
section_title: Caffè sui Navigli
hierarchical_section_title: Alda Merini / Career / Caffè sui Navigli
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: La poetessa Alda Merini mentre si reca al caffè Chimera di Milano, locale che frequentava abitualmente
context_page_description: Alda Merini was an Italian writer and poet. Her work earned the attention and the admiration of other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
  Merini's writing style has been described as intense, passionate and mystic, and it is influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of her most dramatic poems concern her time in a mental health institution. Her 1986 poem The Other Truth. Diary of a Misfit is considered one of her masterpieces.
  In 1996 she was nominated by the Académie Française as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2002 she was made Dame of the Republic. In 2007 she won the Elsa Morante Ragazzi Award with Alda e Io – Favole, a poem written in cooperation with the fable author Sabatino Scia. In the same year she received an honorary degree in Theory of Communication and Languages at the University of Messina. At the time of her death, President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano described her as an "inspired and limpid poetic voice."
context_section_description: Merini's years in Milan were very productive. During the winter of 1989 she started spending time at the cafe/bookshop Chimera, not far from where she lived, offering typewritten poems to her friends. Chimera proved to be a particularly inspirational setting, and it was there that Merini wrote her next two books, Delirio amoroso (Love Delirium, 1989) and Il tormento delle figure (The Figure's Torment, 1990). In 1991 she published Le parole di Alda Merini (The Words of Alda Merini) and Vuoto d'amore (Empty Love). These were followed by Ipotenusa d'amore (Hypothene of Love, 1992), La palude di Manganelli o il monarca del re (The Manganelli Swamp or the King's Monarch, 1993), Aforismi (Aphorisms, with photographs by Giuliano Grittini, 1993) and Titano amori intorno (Titan's Loves Around, 1993). In 1993 she won the Premio Librex Montale for poetry. The prize significantly elevated her status within the Italian literary community, and Merini was rated together with writers such as Giorgio Caproni, Attilio Bertolucci, Mario Luzi, Andrea Zanzotto and Franco Fortini. In 2007 Alda e Io – Favole, written in collaboration with the fable writer Sabatino Scia, won the Elsa Morante Ragazzi prize. On 17 October 2007 Merini received an honorary degree in Theory of Communication and Language at the School of Educational Sciences at the University of Messina, giving a lectio magistralis on the meandering twists and turns of events that constituted her life.
caption: Alda Merini on the way to Caffé Chimera in Milan, c. 1990
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