First Female Person: Anna Maria Ortese and Autobioscopic Writing

This article offers a brief discussion of the autobiographical writing of Anna Maria Ortese, an author who hides herself while unveiling, in a complex game of mirrors in which the Self, as it approaches, moves away, and hides away while observing itself. Dying from sight to be reborn to vision. Il Porto di Toledo is analyzed in filigree with a dense network of female autobiographies that crowd the Italian literary scene of the second half of the twentieth century. Autobiographical practice is articulated in the works of the text, which is the work of the self, and uses speech as a method and tool. It is an autobiography (as here proposed) as an autobioscopy.