Amelia Rosselli (Paris, 28 March 1930 – Rome, 11 February 1996) holds a singular and irreducible place within twentieth-century Italian poetry. Her biography unfolds across geographical and linguistic borders, weaving together diverse cultural contexts and a rigorous musical training shaped within the European postwar avant-garde. This plurality of origins and expressive tools is reflected in a body of writing that resists affiliation with any single tradition, instead moving through and challenging them. Her poetic work is presented here through her own voice — a voice marked by multiple languages and worlds, where a foreign accent, musical tension, and rhythmic precision converge into a distinctive and immediately recognizable diction.

The first section of the project dedicated to her presents a listening program featuring readings and excerpts from Con l’ascia dietro le spalle. Dieci anni senza Amelia Rosselli, a broadcast produced by Radio3 RAI in 2006 to mark the tenth anniversary of her passing. The editing, free of interpretative intervention, restores the full force of Rosselli’s vocal presence through recordings made between the 1980s and 1990s. Stripped of editorial mediation, the readings re-emerge in their original form: rhythm, breath, and tonal intensity become the living substance of the listening experience. Rosselli’s voice does not illustrate the text but re-creates it in the moment of performance, transforming poetry into an acoustic event.

From 29 June onward, the listening program is devoted to a complete reading of Impromptu (Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1981), a long poem in thirteen sections in which Rosselli returns to a form of writing that intertwines political tension with formal inquiry. The title itself evokes the musical form of improvisation, at once free and rigorously structured, reflecting the way language organizes itself according to an inner rhythm.

Recorded by Rosselli herself, for a new edition published by Mancosu in 1993, the reading fully embodies her musical training. Here the voice emerges as the central protagonist, shaping an immersive space in which poetic language unfolds as an experience that is both meditative and radical.

Project realized with the patronage of RAI