Wallis Wilde - Menozzi

Welcome to my web pages. Isn't it amazing how virtual connections lead us to places all over the world? I write in English in Parma Italy, where I have lived for more than 25 years. I hope that my pages give you flashes of recognition as well as discoveries.

My work has grown by giving voice to the dynamic experience of living outside of my language on a daily basis. My material - poetry, memoir, essays, fiction - lies in exploring what empathy is, what stories mean, and giving words new meanings. My voice joins a long list of writers who have existed as immigrants and exiles in all centuries but who now are becoming a wildly growing species. Orphan Pamuk, Anita Desai, Isabel Allende, Milan Kundera, Jamaica Kincaid, Italo Calvino, Doris Lessing are just quick suggestions about the number of writers who have lived in cultures outside of their own, gaining new perspectives on past and present.

Living and writing in Parma has not turned me into an Italian, but being an immigrant has sharpened my identity as a poet with American roots deepened and challenged by Italy's rich and ancient culture.
Mother Tongue-An American Life in Italy, North Point Press, 1997, paperback, 2003 gave voice to this experience.

The impressive lion you see is one of two that guard the wooden doors of the cathedral in Parma. They have looked out on the central square for nine hundred years. Facing them is the Bishop's palace, to their left is Anteleme's Baptistery, which is among the most spectacular in Italy.

Inside the cathedral, the dome and four walls have been fully used by Correggio to tell the stories of the Gospel. He painted the dome, however, to represent the assumption of Mary into heaven. In the heart of the city, in its most glorious spot, he has depicted a woman rising up to the level of God's son. Correggio also painted the dome in San Giovanni, which is behind the cathedral. But the most controversial and startling thing he did in Parma, was to paint a room in the Convent of San Paolo for a Mother Superior, Giovanna da Piancenza, who commissioned him. Her order, which had been self governing since the middle of the eleventh century, was shut down in 1524. The mysterious room played its part in showing how far the life in convents had moved from strictly religious concerns. By representing a secular alchemical vision, far from religious teaching, the Renaissance and its revival of classical learning proclaimed itself. Giovanna, a fiercely independent woman, a controversial figure about whom little is known or agreed upon,is one of many women who appear in my memoir about my life in Italy. Mystery that she is, and mystery that her room's iconography remains, she came alive to me, as I felt her fearlessness in opposing the existing powers by fighting for her order's freedom.

The following is the opening paragraph to one of two chapters on Giovanna.

"I wanted Giovanna for myself. Like John D. Rockefeller, who reconstructed a French medieval cloister on the Upper West Side of New York City, I wished to set up the badessa elsewhere, out of Parma's history and ideologies. To lift her significance into relief, I wanted to coax Giovanna into my own ends. Her cloistering was simple. The meaning of her silencing seemed clear. But it was impossible. Like the magnificent fresco that she had commissioned about 1519 from Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio, she was bound by time, an institution, and a culture. I couldn't see her my way. As to her person, most of her existence was not recorded; I had only the intrinsic pattern of a few facts. My eyes often strained, trying to find contact in dusty books and sometimes I realized that I was staring into space.
The Renaissance woman who attracted me was complex. The freedom fighter resisting the orders of three popes was fierce and courageous, but the cloistered human being moved me more, even if the life she lived in that condition was brief. The state of siege leading up to it was a long ordeal. As the world shifted on her, its darkness drew out her identity's groping, deep roots. Her own doubts and her awareness of violation as the church's power flogged her brought her vulnerability close. I felt her stark eyes, no longer protected by privilege. The weapon that testified to her resistance: words. Because of the twelve intelligent, rebellious lines she left, I knew her. For their contents, a single feeling overcame me: I wish that I could have kept watch, sharing a few hours of her despair."