House Without Men

In the first English translation of Fausta Cialente’s ‘A Very Cold Winter,’ institutions imposed on women by patriarchal forces ‘appear as foreign and inexplicable as language itself.’

By Francesca MancinoMarch 22, 2026

• Fiction

• History

This is the first installment of a new column on books that have been, until recently, only available secondhand—out of print and out of literary memory—or, for decades, unavailable to an Anglophone readership. The column will examine reissues and old books made new through the hard work of contemporary publishers, editors, and translators.

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IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL novel-cum-feminist-manifesto A Woman (1906), Sibilla Aleramo insists upon the “need to reform the consciousness of man—and to create one for women.” Men and women alike, she believes, have failed to capture the essence and subtlety of femininity in writing. Male authors, prone to reducing women to “sentimental elaborations and sexual perversions,” have yet to produce “a great female character.” They wrongly favor fantastical, mythical archetypes: Dante transmutes Beatrice into a “cipher” and Petrarch makes Laura a “hieroglyph.” On the other hand, the flat portrayal of a “one-dimensional, self-sacrificing creature” also lacks a nuanced complexity. Instead, women and mothers should be understood by their nature—simply as “a woman, a human being.”

But if men are at fault for their elevated figurines of women, female intellectuals are guilty of their own wrongs. Aleramo explains how the latter does not see that “a woman cannot justify her entry into the already congested field of literature and art except by producing works that emphatically bear her own imprint.” “Impronta,” Aleramo’s equivalent for “imprint,” has both abstract and material connotations, referring to a mark, a stamp, or a fingerprint.

The subgenre of the postwar Italian women’s novel bears a consistent and characteristic impronta—one that foregrounds the destabilizing effects of war, the burdens of love and motherhood, and an irrepressible yearning that fascism cannot eclipse. In the pages of Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Alba de Céspedes, Lalla Romano, and Anna Maria Ortese, there is a variance of the same fraught, sometimes filthy, feelings. Together, they map a spectrum of affect that recenters female experience around indifference, unhappiness, anger, shame, and jealousy. The resonances in their works, which often depict the struggle of conflicting desires, represent how women endured the twin restraints of patriarchy and fascist rule.

Fascist propaganda endeavored to popularize an image of the midcentury Italian woman as modern yet traditional at a time when their sociopolitical commitments and pleasures were evolving. According to Victoria de Grazia’s 1992 book How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945, championing the emancipated woman came with a caveat: the fascist dictatorship fought to bar women from experiencing enjoyment together in the public sphere—everything from shopping to attending sports events and mass rallies. Pleasure and oppression battled for dominance over one another, only to settle for walking hand in hand, thereby creating cognitive dissonance.

The thickest thread that weaves through the tradition of the postwar Italian women’s novel is that of estrangement—female characters estranged from themselves, their gender, and their social role. In these women’s stories, the institutions of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity appear as foreign and inexplicable as language itself. Defamiliarization, a two-pronged aesthetic, challenges a male-dominated Italian culture and the male-dominated literary form of the novel. Women characters, then, tend to approach the microcosms of their homes with a mild madness that indicates their refusal to recognize their senselessly shattered world.

In Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook (1952; trans. Ann Goldstein, 2023), love loses its luster since it is treated as another domestic chore that must be interminably maintained. When Valeria, who has been married to Michele for 23 years, hears her friend talk of love in this way, she notices that a “cold happiness” has congealed because she cannot contrive it for her husband. Over time, a mundane “I love you” sounds empty and unfamiliar, stripped of its substance. Valeria wonders “what the word ‘love’ means […] and what feelings am I alluding to when I say, ‘I love my husband.’” Her affair with her boss, Guido, reawakens her to a new type of love. As her lexicon of passion evolves, she has a choice: she can choose Guido’s affection, which she oftentimes prefers, over Michele’s.

But perhaps Paola Masino’s Birth and Death of the Housewife (1945; trans. Marella Feltrin-Morris, 2009) captures the most startling, satirical scene of estrangement. The nameless protagonist, referred to only as “the Housewife,” laps the “resplendently polished floors” with her tongue to ensure that the marble is spotless. In a moment of perverse pleasure, her lips move mindlessly and rhythmically against the floor until she orgasms. The pressures of cleanliness and submission are subordinate to private sexual gratification.

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Fausta Cialente, a close friend of Aleramo’s, now joins the cohort of women writers whose work has been recently republished or translated from Italian into English. The last time one of Cialente’s works was introduced to an English-speaking audience was in the early 1960s, when Isabel Quigly translated her 1961 novel The Levantines. Though Un inverno freddissimo (1966) was published a few years later, it has only now been brought into English for the first time, as A Very Cold Winter, by Julia Nelsen for Transit Books.

Cialente reliably wrote for Noi donne (“We Women”), a popular feminist magazine launched in the 1930s, with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. In 1952, she criticized the wrongful imprisonment of female protesters in San Severo, and in 1954, she wrote about Tolstoy’s female characters to commemorate the author’s 125th birthday. Twenty years later, her article “Meglio senza famiglia” (“Better Without Family”) took on a more personal note as she chronicled the nightmares of her childhood to advocate for the legality of divorce.

Despite having authored six novels and many short stories, Cialente, in A Very Cold Winter, exposes how the war evacuated meaning from language, leaving only “weak, cold words” behind. Reminiscent of domestic fictions like Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, Lalla Romano’s A Silence Shared (1957), and Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas, the action of A Very Cold Winter is mostly isolated to Camilla’s snug attic, which has survived the bombings in Milan. Eight people are crammed inside, including Camilla’s three children: Alba, who chases a flashier lifestyle; Lalla, who wants to be a writer; and Guido, who dreams of acting in movies and plays. Camilla’s nephew Arrigo and his wife Milena, along with Camilla’s late nephew Nicola’s wife Regina and daughter Nicoletta, crowd inside the attic too, where the smothering space is split into makeshift rooms.

Women so outnumber men that Alba thinks of the attic as “a house without men.” We can read Cialente’s book with its three female types in focus: Camilla as the abandoned matriarch, Alba as the rebellious daughter, and Regina as the lonely widow. A Very Cold Winter establishes Cialente’s impronta on the postwar Italian women’s novel by placing men at the periphery. Unlike Valeria’s choice to have an affair in Forbidden Notebook or the unnamed narrator’s decision to shoot her husband in Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart (1947), the women in A Very Cold Winter do not seek freedom from men, nor do they need them to take control of their lives. Here, womanly ambition and desire take on a new manifestation of independence that coexists with domestic forms of patriarchal control.

Upon her husband’s departure, Camilla’s relation to men is characterized by absence. Having gone to Paris for his work as a scrap-iron salesman, Dario stopped writing to her and disappeared. Too young to have preserved memories of their father, Lalla and Guido fashion him into a character with a chimerical fate. They wonder if he dashed to a country in South America with melon-sized butterflies or if he walks among crowds under otherworldly moons and stars. Wherever he is, Lalla resolutely believes Dario has his three children’s names tattooed on his chest.

By childishly inscribing their father with devotional, ethereal qualities, they fail to see Camilla. Only the narrator values the virtuosity of her “handiness, practicality, good judgment: the qualifications any good housewife should possess.” Her full-time labor of maintaining the attic is rarely rewarding, upending the sentimental ideal that domestic labor is always a labor of love. With the same chores needing to be executed routinely ad nauseam, a woman’s sense of value is slowly eroded: she is most esteemed for being an automaton. Lalla observes that her mother carries out her duties with only the wish to close her wicker door at night and be alone.

Like the mythical configuration of a woman that Aleramo cautions against, the narrator sublimates Guido’s image of Camilla into a model of Mary, “the Mother.” In Guido’s young eyes, Camilla possesses “some greatness, a noble spirit, and that image helped him forget the times.” But when she is agitated or distressed, showing any hint of humanity beyond motherhood, he finds her “unrecognizable” and rebels in response. The choral element of coalescing and colliding perspectives in A Very Cold Winter allows the reader to see Lalla’s alternative reading of Camilla. Guido overlooks what Lalla notices: an arduous performance of maternity. After Camilla shows concern for how tired Lalla looks, she senses that her mother is feigning attention, playing a part.

When Camilla prepares the attic for everyone to move in, her family only complains, instead of trying to help or even thank her. The omniscient narrator, the voice of an all-seeing woman aware of how motherhood requires endurance, passes moral judgment: “Mothers have to grin and bear it. They should have thought twice before bringing children into the world, too bad for them.” Cialente and her contemporaries question whether motherhood is worth the cost of its burdens, after the rites of marriage and birth are accomplished. What happens when convention is followed and a woman becomes unhappy with her decisions? If she refuses to abandon home or her family, what are her choices?

Maintaining the safety and comfort of the attic is Camilla’s responsibility, but it is consistently under threat. The furnace pipe, saturated with soot, catches fire, and the frigid temperatures prompt the children to wear parkas over their pajamas. Like the attic, its inhabitants are vulnerable to a gradual destruction. Regina feels a hollowness that mimics “one of those wrecked buildings, with the façade still standing, but empty inside.” With Camilla, we wonder if the facade has already given way. Beyond the material pressures posed by the attic, she feels responsible for Alba’s overt discontent with their poverty. She balances feeling like a doomed “woman on [her] own” with an overwhelming, “irrepressible feeling of being alive, of expecting something from life.” These contradictions, “the true companion of her solitude,” subjugate her.

Dario’s absence incrementally crystallizes into a “cold contempt” within Camilla. Her solitude is a painful reminder of the happiness she sought with him. Before he left her, she asked him, on a beach in Southern Italy, “Would [we] always be so happy, all together?” From behind his book, Dario coolly responded, “Why shouldn’t we be?” Recalling this conversation more than once, Camilla contemplates the fragility of once-held truths. Both love and words are futile—neither can secure familial permanence or affection. Yet love initiates a banal circuit: Dario’s abandonment corners her into an oppressive lifestyle. The everyday, which is consumed by the menial, leaves her bitter, lonely, and alone. Then, love appears momentarily tantalizing, as when Rosso, the neighbor of Camilla’s mother, shyly flirts with her.

When Alba, like Dario, escapes from home, her running away is described as “another consequence of the war, which claimed many victims […] she risked being a victim too—without realizing it, apparently.” Cialente exposes how children, who did not start or fight in the war, are still victims of a stolen national happiness. Camilla does not understand why Alba left and, when she sifts through the possible reasons, she only finds “an enormous amount of love, a love as naive as it was useless.” Alba is accompanied by Sandro, a boy she met at a dinner with her former co-worker. They perform a “make-believe love” that is too frail to materialize. She feels as if something prevents her from loving Sandro, and she often forgets his name. This forgetfulness, rather than ignorance or obliviousness, becomes Alba’s trick to combat the war’s dominance over her. Her escape is entwined with an aspiration to forget: “How could [we] ever be happy again, otherwise?”

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The postwar Italian novel is symphonic, but the melodies of its characters—a blending of hushed voices, feelings, and secrets—slip past or clash against one another rather than harmonize. Cialente’s characters cope with the aftermath of the war by holding their feelings closely and concealing them. “[F]orever carrying a secret inside,” in bed at night, they rest “upon their sad memories, their biting heartaches and bitter hopes, innocent or shameful desires.” A Very Cold Winter’s narrator shares secrets with the reader that the characters cannot share with one another.

The snow, like their secrets and desires, accumulates. Heavy snowfall, submerging and disfiguring Milan, presages a final collapse. When it tries to find its way inside the attic, crumpled newspaper stuffed into a hole in the wall is a futile attempt to keep it outside. One character cries that if the snow continues to descend so forcefully, the attic’s roof may fall on their heads. Though menacing in its intensity, its innocent invasion of the attic is also reparative, filling its cracks. The fresh snow is a deceptive, delightful facade that blankets the city’s blemishes: “The vast city, all dressed up in white, was almost beautiful despite its deep wounds.” This snowy splendor is ephemeral, though, waiting to be sullied by a dark fog left behind by the war that has yet to lift.

Like the fog that hovers over Milan, Camilla discovers a strange, shadowy “bleakness” following her, but it is different from the monotonous chores and complaints that darken the attic’s drab atmosphere. Rather, it is “something sinister that followed her, lurking in the dark kitchen and nuzzling against the squalid walls.” This ominous presence emits a dreadful scent from the drain and puts a glossy glimmer on the pots and pans. The vibrant memory of a distant sun, especially its “sweet warmth,” stalks her—a reminder of the tranquility found on a southern beach.

But a more permanent warmth cannot be found on a beach—not with family or a lover, or even in prewar times. It is only, Camilla believes, “misfortune and suffering, the absolute void that death brought with it,” that will “create a deeper unity among people, a lasting warmth.” When the lives of everyone who has suffered conjoin with hers, this coalition could counteract their collective suffering. Lalla holds a similar truth, that “sorrow and regret are vital to truly expressing oneself, to rendering the world […] but so is yearning for something, delighting in life, holding others close and sharing their warmth, forging ahead together.” Decades earlier, in A Woman, Aleramo similarly concluded that only collective strife can save and embolden humankind: “I disappeared, together with my misery: before me there was nothing but the beauty of the human struggle to raise itself up in the vastness of the world.” This is the shared impronta of the postwar Italian women’s novel: its characteristic cheerlessness has a unified purpose forged by an alliance of the suffering.

As Lalla longs for a better life and for the vocabulary to write of it, she buries her memories “to let the sediment settle, like in a good wine.” Meanwhile, Regina’s memories already have fermented, and her former lust for life is revitalized. Milan begins to defrost as the peach trees blossom and the sky regains its blue hue. Camilla resists lighting the fire in her bedroom, preferring to think spring has come again. Even though Milan has yet to repair itself, every “icy feeling,” she believes, can begin to thaw.