Morante, Elsa

The Italian author Elsa Morante was born in Rome, where she grew up in the poor working-class district of Testaccio. She herself, however, held that it was by the end of the First World War that she was born. Morante was very secretive about her childhood and adolescence. She even gave false information about these things and held that everything important about her could be found in her works. Her father was the Sicilian Francesco Lo Monaco, but both she and her siblings for a long time thought that the school teacher Augusto Morante was her father. This was a family secret that was not revealed until Elsa was in her late teens. Her mother, Irma Poggibonzi, came from northern Italy and was of Jewish descent, a fact that would become significant for Morante during the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War.