Collection: Cristina Campo

Cristina Campo (1923–1977) was born in Bologna and brought up in Florence. A congenital heart malformation kept Campo out of school and social life for much of her childhood, forcing her into a reclusion enlivened by her reading. A bona fide autodidact, she had by her teens begun to read deeply in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English literature. After World War II, Campo moved to Rome, where she became acquainted with Eugenio Montale, Curzio Malaparte, and Roberto Bazlen, among others. Intensely private, she almost always published under pseudonyms (Cristina Campo being one of them) and translated—Simone Weil, Katherine Mansfield, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf—far more than she wrote. Although she had always been a Catholic, in the 1960s Campo’s faith became more fervent; she spent long periods in convents and strongly opposed the Second Vatican Council’s relinquishment of the Latin liturgy. Her heart continued to cause her serious trouble throughout her life, and she died in Rome at the age of fifty-three.