When Lalla Romano first met Innocenzo Monti, the first thing she noticed were his hands. They were “big and long, his fingers together, extended; and his gesturing, almost hieratic.” This physical characteristic set Monti apart from the other men in her provincial town: “That stylization of the gesture and hands, clearly spontaneous, was attractive, exciting. And he, immediately different from our usual companions on those hikes, who were so uninspiring.” This simple act of observation comes to define the couple’s long marriage: through Romano’s eyes every aspect of her husband’s being, even during his long final illness and death, becomes beautiful and worthy of sustained attention.
Graziella “Lalla” Romano was born in 1906 in Cuneo, a city in the Italian Alps. She studied literature and art history at the University of Turin, where Cesare Pavese and Lionello Venturi inspired her interest in writing and painting. After her marriage to Monti in 1932, Romano gave birth to a son, Piero, and published her first book of poetry in 1941. When her apartment was bombed by Allied forces during World War II, she joined the anti-fascist Partito d’Azione (Action Party) in Cuneo. Her first novel, Maria, about her family’s servant Maria Bottero, was published in 1953. Its success inspired Romano to draw upon her autobiographical experiences over the course of her career.
Her Strega Prize-winning 1969 novel Le parole tra noi leggere (Light Words Between Us), which has not yet been translated into English, chronicled her relationship with her son, but her ambivalence and reluctance towards motherhood was considered shocking for the time, and the depiction of their sometimes difficult dynamic further strained her relationship with Piero. Like Annie Ernaux, who chronicled the suffocating realities of domestic life in A Frozen Woman, Romano was one of the first writers to give voice to the unspoken difficulties of marriage and motherhood.
Romano went on to produce an extensive and varied body of work, including poetry, short stories, and novels, receiving Italy’s top literary prize for lifetime achievement, the Penna d’Oro, in 1979, but her writing is still largely unknown outside her home country. In Farthest Seas was initially published as Nei mari estremi in 1987 after Monti’s death as an attempt to pay homage to the couple’s life together. Newly translated by Brian Robert Moore, who also translated her novel A Silence Shared for Pushkin Press in 2023, the narrative is distilled into dazzling shards of memory, written in two parts: the first four years of their relationship and the final four months before his death.
For a memoir about her husband, Romano at first appears surprisingly hostile to the idea of marriage: “I’d always detested, no less than now, the words: wife, husband, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, and the like.” Before a trip to San Maurizio with Monti early in their relationship, Romano noncommittedly tells her mother that they “might get married.” While the couple crosses a piazza holding hands, Romano realizes that “an ‘honest’ family unit… was shooting sideways glances, suspicious and icy.” Their unchaperoned relationship scandalized the provincial town, causing her family to receive suspicious comments from neighbors and even anonymous letters criticizing their relationship. “It was a bit like we were the first human couple—or the last—for all the astonishment we provoked.” Yet their relationship is founded on quiet moments of artistic and intellectual connection, sparked by their long conversations on hikes through the Italian countryside. The first section of the book culminates with the couple’s wedding and arrival at their new home, closing the chapter on the idyllic early days of their marriage. The abrupt transition to the longer second section, in which Romano recounts the final months of Monti’s illness and death, is a jarring temporal switch, eliding the ordinary moments of their decades-long relationship in favor of a stark depiction of its beginning and end.
According to Romano’s afterword, she wrote the reflection on the final months of Monti’s illness first, only drafting what she calls “the backstory” years later. She describes her sense of urgency to capture her husband’s unnamed illness, how it “guided and dictated [her] writing like a silent voice.” Monti first experiences a premonition of his forthcoming death during a trip the couple took to Camogli: “I knew in April, that I had to go.” Romano responds by keeping a series of notes she titles Minima mortalia, or “thoughts on mortality.” After Monti’s death, it seemed to Romano that “everything went dark”: “Suddenly time had been cut frighteningly short; like for a person plummeting who sees moving towards her the ground where she’ll be crushed.”
His rapid decline distorts her sense of time. She wrote in September 1984—during his final weeks—that “we count time no longer in years, but by months, then by weeks, by days. Except that these months, days, hours, are centuries.” Monti’s slow “waning” or “largo” caused Romano, then nearing the age of eighty, to contemplate her own mortality: “A cosmic slowness distorted time, because the time was so little.” The structure of the book contributes to this sense of rapidly dwindling time: while the first fifty pages comprise four years, the last four months of Monti’s life are extended into a prolonged meditation interspersed with memories from earlier in their relationship. The impression is that Romano is attempting to stretch time in order to prolong her husband’s life, summoning memories of his past selves as a form of resistance against death.
Romano continued to paint throughout her life: her former house in Milan was converted into a museum to showcase her work, and in 2009, eight years after her death, a retrospective of her paintings was held in Aosta. Her lifelong interest in visual art is clearly evident in her spare, vivid depictions of memory. Certain descriptions, such as the dress she wore on her trip to San Maurizio, draw upon art historical references: “It was long and smooth, black, made of very heavy and soft silk; it resembled women’s dresses in fourteenth-century frescos.” Even the novel’s title comes from a landscape picture Romano cut out of a newspaper and framed in her study: “It is a split iceberg: a ship passes between the two walls of ice, as though through a valley. I’ve always called it ‘in farthest seas.’” The image aptly conjures the kaleidoscopic memoir of their marriage, where Romano floats adrift on the sea of memory. It also suggests the inevitability of watching one’s life partner die. Although Monti may be passing unseen through two walls of ice, Romano still feels his presence for the rest of her life.
In another memory, Romano recounts a moment from her teenage years when her parents returned with a catalogue from the Turin Biennial. A painting entitled The Poet featured a “young, tall man [who] looks pensively at a lake; an overcoat folded on his arm.” In this image, Romano reflects that she had “later identified Innocenzo. I consider it one of my premonitions of him, of his happening.” Here, Romano reflects on the apparent inevitability of their marriage. By suggesting she was destined to meet Monti, she extends their bond back in time before their first encounter, just as she extends it forward in time by memorializing him after his death. Late in her life, Romano embarked on a second relationship with a young photographer and journalist, Antonio Ria, with whom she would collaborate on a series of photographic texts. But photography, as an alternate mode of memorialization, is one Romano ultimately rejects in In Farthest Seas. She remembers saying to her son Piero after his father’s death: “You should have taken a photograph of your dad in these final days.” Piero replied, “I thought about it, but it would have shown a lack of respect towards him.” Romano ultimately agrees with Piero’s opinion that the act of photographing Monti would have been a stark, almost brutal intrusion into a dying man’s final moments. Instead, she remembers her husband through a series of cherished memories: hikes on sunlit hills in Cuneo, wedding anniversaries spent in London, his face in sleep.
In her afterword, Romano writes that she “had come to a dividing line in my life” after her husband’s death. She was compelled with a sense of “urgency” to start the memoir, with writing as a form of “accumulation” against loss. Nevertheless, she experienced an overwhelming sense of annihilation: “I felt as if I were the one who had to pass out of existence, as if the other passing had not already taken place.” Her experience echoes Simone Weil’s concept of decreation, a form of self-emptying that enables one to forge a deeper connection with God and the universe. The narrative’s form is accordingly founded on moments of connection and revelation, rather than a linear experience of time. “It is neither the events, nor the language, that give meaning to a book,” she writes. “What I’ve called pauses, and which are returns, reflections—questions and answers to myself—contain, I believe, the reasons for this story. They are the voice that I give to the infinite silence that had swallowed me whole.”
In Farthest Seas collages disparate fragments of memory and embodies the stream-of-consciousness narration of literary modernism. It resembles feminist modernist autobiographical writing such as Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past (1939), in which the author recalls incidents of heightened consciousness during her childhood that she terms “moments of being.” Romano’s memoir is an early example of feminist life writing, comparable to the work of not just of Ernaux, but also the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and the autobiography of Marguerite Duras, in which the minutiae of women’s daily lives and autobiographical experiences are elevated to literary significance.
But Romano wrote outside these anglophone and francophone traditions, in a country with a much more conservative perception of traditional gender roles. Her style was an especially bold intervention in the literary scene of midcentury Italy, then dominated by male writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Pavese. For this reason, Romano is often compared to her contemporary Natalia Ginzburg. Like Romano, Ginzburg was a member of the socialist Partito d’Azione, whose clandestine newspaper was published by her husband. Both women also worked at the boundaries of form: In Farthest Seas is categorized as a novel although it is autobiographical in nature, just like Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (1969). In the introduction to Family Lexicon, Ginzburg writes:
The places, events, and people in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing, and each time I found myself slipping into my long-held habits as a novelist and made something up, I was quickly compelled to destroy the invention. The names are also real… I have written only what I remember. If read as a history, one will object to the infinite lacunae. Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.
By likewise avoiding the categorization of In Farthest Seas as either a novel or a memoir, Romano expands the temporal possibilities of life writing, resisting a chronological narrative of her marriage to pay homage to the most impactful moments of the life she built with her husband. This restructuring of form hones in on the moments of connection, or “moments of being,” the couple shared, memories Romano believes best embody the nature of their marriage. The result is a moving meditation on memory and loss, where the fragmented chronology mirrors how grief disrupts the flow of time.
In an interview with the Italian broadcaster RAI, Romano once observed how the nature of memory both “conserves and deforms,” how “we invent the people we love.” Although Romano’s task of attempting to preserve her husband’s memory through her words may seem an impossible one, the act of writing itself becomes a way to meditate on his existence and honor his memory.
Eliza Browning
Eliza Browning is an English PhD candidate at Princeton currently based in London. Her work has previously appeared in Chicago Review, Asymptote, Full Stop, Cambridge Review of Books, Oxford Review of Books, and Boston Art Review, among others.