“Sir, please do not tell me that, when you go away, love denied me crying because seeing me already extinguished the fire, the water had no place to temper it somewhat; indeed say that was pretty much at that point the ardor that made dry mood; and I could not show my worth with the bitter tears, so that my body, devoid of any humor, or stood around the fire, or all of stone.”
Her life was like the sea. Its water was her weeping, and the winds the breath of his hopes. The hope was his ship, his wishes was sails and oars, those who quickly move inside its existence. The north wind was to her a holy light, as well as the Sun and the Moon, the ones that rotated on top of her, indicating the route to follow. All this, she watched in a detached way, without fear of their contact, and storms – even sudden, or dangerous – they were for her the anxieties and jealousies, those that take a long time to run away, but a short time to come back. To Stampa Gaspara, there was never absence of wind, because when him was gone, the serenity of his life was gone, along with him.
Gaspara was born in 1523, in Padua – a city in the north-east of Italy – but with his family, at the age of 19, she had moved to Venice, a place that feeds some of his natural inclination for music and poetry. In the Academy of Doubters, her beauty had not gone unnoticed, because the Lord of Collalto by attending the literary salon of Casa Print, he falling in love with her.
“You, who hear in these mournful rhymes, | in these sad, in these dark accents | love the sound of my moans | and from his pains between my other first, | when will anyone appreciate and estimates of valor, | glory not that pardon, de ‘my complaints | hope to find among the well-born people, | then that their cause is so sublime.”
That beautiful woman who loved the sea and the winds, among many storms passionate love, had described in his Rime its existence, one that even today – with surprise – we can browse, observing ceremonies and situations that have preserved an impressive freshness , where love between a woman named Gaspara and a man named Collatino, it still moves in sails and oars, what we call infatuation and love. It was a spring day, the 23rd of April 1554, the one where his ship had stopped in the absence of wind. His life had not resisted the last storm of the pains of love.
The century of Gaspara Stampa, is described in a novel of love and adventure – THE LAST ROW – published by Meeting Benches in the e-book version of the Italian language,imminent the arrival of the English version.
