Gina Lagorio

Writer

  • Born: January 6, 1922
  • Birthplace: Bra, Italy
  • Died: July 17, 2005
  • Place of death: Milan, Italy

Biography

Gina Lagorio was the pseudonym of Luigina Bernocco, born on January 6, 1922, in Bra, Italy, a town in the Piedmont region. Her father was Giovanni Battista Bernocco and her mother was Pierina Picollo. After World War I the family moved from Piedmont to Liguria to work in a family-owned winery in Savona.

Lagorio studied at both the Instituto Magistrale Guiliano Della Rovere and the University of Turin, receiving a literature degree from the latter in 1943. Two years later, she married a businessman, Emilio Lagorio, and in 1946 their daughter, Simonetta, was born. Lagorio began publishing her writing in newspapers and magazines in the 1950’s.

In a January 13, 2001, interview with Anna M. Smith, posted on the Dialogo libriWeb site, Lagorio said she began writing when she was ten years old. When she became a wife and mother, she wrote at night. Her first book, Le novelle de Simonetta, was written for her daughter and contained stories she told her daughter to help her fall asleep.

In 1954, Lagorio became a professor of history and Italian literature at the Instituto Magistrale Mondovi and then at the Instituto Tecnico Commerciali in Savona, where she taught for eighteen years. During that time, her second daughter, Silvia, was born in 1960. Her husband died three years later.

Lagorio’s collection of twelve short stories, Il polline, appeared in 1966 and features characters returning to their roots in the Piedmont region. Her novel, Un ciclone chiamato Titti, published in 1969, was dedicated to her youngest daughter and is a mother-daughter story set in Liguria. The narrator, named Gina, recounts her relationship with a daughter born to her late in life. In 1971, Lagorio published her novel, Approssimato per difetto, dedicated to her late husband, the story of a husband and wife who examine their relationship as the husband dies of a brain tumor.

In 1973, Lagorio stopped teaching and moved to Milan, where she worked as an editorial consultant to Garzanti, a publishing house. In the early 1970’s, she published a number of nonfiction works and contributed to periodicals such as Corriere della sera and L’Unita. In 1979, she was awarded the Premio Campiello for La spiaggia del lupo, published two years earlier. In 1981, she married Livio Garzanti of Garzanti publishing.

In 1983, Lagorio won the Premio Flaiano for her play, Raccontami quella de Flic, and in 1984, she won the Premio Viareggio for Tosca dei gatti, a novel about a middle-aged woman who fills her life and apartment with cats. In 1987, she was elected to a seat in the Italian Parliament, where she served for five years. She produced works as diverse as Il bastardo, a fictionalized account of the seventeenth century life of Don Emmanuel, the illegitimate and homosexual son of Carlo Emmanuele I of Savoy, and Inventario, a very personal examination of Lagorio’s own life. She also wrote for theater and television. L’elogio della zucca, published in 2000, is a mix of short stories about love, death, and aging, Lagorio’s memories of her childhood in Piedmont and Liguria, and essays on life’s small pleasures, such as growing pumpkins. Two weeks before her death on July 17, 2005, she completed her final book, Càpita, which dealt with her recovery from a stroke two years earlier.