Silvana Lattmann
Silvana Lattmann (born 8 November 1918) is an Italian-Swiss poet and author. Personal life and education. Silvania Abruzzese (later Lattmann), was born in Naples, Italy in 1918. Her parents were Alfonso and Alba (birth family name Scanferla) Abruzzese. Her father died when she was young and the family then moved to several cities including Sanremo, Rome, Milan and Genoa. She attended university in Rome and Genoa to study biology and natural sciences, graduating in July 1942. In July 1942, she married Michele Sgarlata, a naval engineer stationed on the operating in the Mediterranean that was torpedoed and  sunk on 6 December 1942 killing almost all the crew, including her husband. In 1943 she gave birth to their son Massimo. In 1954, she married Charles Lattmann, an academic at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. She became a Swiss citizen, and moved with him to St. Gallen in Switzerland. She lived in Zürich from 1993 although spent substantial time on the Italian island of Ischia in the early 2000s. In 2018, when she moved to a retirement home in Rüschlikon. Career. She is known as a writer of poems and fiction but only started writing in the 1970s  when she was in her 60s. She had previously worked in several areas, including in biological science research. She writes predominantly in Italian. After the Second World War ended, she was employed as an assistant at the University of Milan and as a researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, a multidisciplinary biological research institute in Naples. Between 1948 and 1954 she taught in secondary schools in Bergamo, Milan and Rome. Her first published works were poems in the anthology "Almanacco dello Specchio" in 1978 and then in 1980 "Le storie di Ariano" that contained more of her poems as  well as literary studies. The critical success of "Fessura" ("Crevice") in 1983, and mentorship by Pio Fontana, the Professor of Italian literature at the University of St. Gallen, led her to publish collections of poems regularly until the 1990s. Her narrative poems relate to events over several generation that resolve tragedies. The figure of an angel, as a guide, mystery and representation of love is a recurring image in her poems. In the 1990s, Lattmann began to study Eastern philosophies, which changed the direction of her writing. This was first seen in "Malâkut" ("Space of the Angels" in Farsi) published  in 1996. She retained the image of an angel in this work. Awards. She has been awarded prizes by the Swiss Schiller Foundation: