Amelia Rosselli

Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 to the British political activist Marion Cave and Carlo Rosselli, an antifascist Italian political leader and philosopher of Jewish descent. In 1948, she settled in Rome where she would spend the rest of her life. She translated Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath into Italian and was an accomplished musicologist and musician, who played the violin, the piano, and the organ. Rosselli published eight collections of poetry: War Variations (1964), Hospital Series (1969), Document (1966–1973) (1976), Impromptu (1981), First Writings (1952-1963) (1980), Notes Scattered and Lost 1966–1977 (1983), Obtuse Diary 1954–1968 (1990), and Sleep: Poems in English (1992). Aside from one early collection, all of Rosselli’s works have been translated into English. After years of struggling with mental illness, Rosselli took her own life in 1996.