California Italian Studies

Despite her active involvement in several of the Gruppo 63’s meetings and activities over the years, Carla Vasio (b. 1923) is rarely mentioned in critical discussions of the Italian neo-avant-garde, and very little attention has been devoted to her work. This is not an isolated oversight, but a part of a larger pattern of marginalizing women writers. Our reading of two of Vasio’s most interesting and innovative novels—L’orizzonte (1966) and La più grande anamorfosi del mondo (2009)–shows that this marginalization is unjustified, and that she is a writer who actively contributed to the aesthetic innovation of the Gruppo 63 while creating her own experimental narrative style. Vasio’s literary experimentation is an example of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, distinguished by its sophisticated feminist critique of both the dominant masculinist dynamic of the Gruppo 63 and the misogyny of postwar Italian culture and society.