Italian poet Amelia Rosselli grew up in an environment jolted by -assaults of personal and social history. The daughter of one of the heroes of the Italian Resistance during World War II, she suffered her father's assassination when she was seven. After an adolescence characterized by movement between cities and continents, her mother died, triggering a mental breakdown in the daughter. War Variations encompasses these intense life experiences, terrifying psychological realities that ultimately led to Rosselli's suicide.
The daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 and spent her childhood in France. Growing up speaking French, English, and Italian, she was, from her childhood on, multilingual, which would highly influence the syntactical complexity of her poetry, particularly her major collection Variazioni belliche (War Variations), published in 1964.The second determinating factor of her life was the murder of her father, the anti-Fascist martyr Carlo Rosselli, and his brother - both brutally killed by order of Benito Mussolini and Galeazzo Ciano, at Bagnole-de-l'Orne, Normandy. This event, and its aftermath - during the war she and her mother traveled throughout Europe to escape the Nazis - would have a lasting effect on her mental health. Much of her life was spent in therapy, and in 1996 she leaped from her high-rise apartment to her death. Rosselli herself has described the death of her father leaving an emotional void, which she attempted to fill through her writing.
