Chapter One
Two Uncles
The year of Elsa Morante's birth is well known. But, as a favor, in an autobiographical piece she wrote in 1960, she has asked that her biographer not mention the date—not because she is vain but because, for her, one year is as good as the next and she would prefer to remain ageless.1 It is the same year that the Titanic set out on its doomed maiden voyage with 2,224 passengers and crew members on board; the same year that Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy renewed the Triple Alliance; the year of the outbreak of the Balkan War, which set the stage for World War I; the year the Olympic games were held in Stockholm and the twenty-four-year-old Native American Jim Thorpe won both the pentathlon and decathlon (he was later stripped of his medals when it was learned that he had played semiprofessional baseball); in the United States, the year that New Mexico and Arizona became states; the year that the German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Lothar Wegener proposed his theory of continental drif ... read full excerpt from: Woman of Rome ebook
