Background
The daughter of a theatre critic and translator from Liguria and an artist from Turin, she was born in Milan and was educated at the University of Milan, receiving a degree in philosophy in 1996.
1988
An earlier photo of Paola Capriolo.
Via Festa del Perdono, 7, 20122 Milano MI, Italy
Paola Capriolo earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Milan in 1996.
Paola Capriolo's photo.
(Based on Puccini's opera, Floria Tosca reinterprets for t...)
Based on Puccini's opera, Floria Tosca reinterprets for today's times the relationship between Scarpia, chief of police, and Tosca, singer, and lover of Cavaradossi, the radical, whom Scarpia plans to arrest and torture. In elegant, precise writing, Paola Capriolo takes us to a world where love and hatred, piety and devilry, abstinence and desire come together.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1852423811/?tag=2022091-20
1997
The daughter of a theatre critic and translator from Liguria and an artist from Turin, she was born in Milan and was educated at the University of Milan, receiving a degree in philosophy in 1996.
Paola Capriolo earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Milan in 1996.
Paola Capriolo works as a writer. Writing in World Literature Today, Rocco Capozzi noted of Paola Capriolo that “with each new novel [Capriolo] has shown great narrative skills, the ability to construct suspenseful stories, and a talent for unusual and colorful descriptions and original settings." In a dozen works, which include novels, short story collections, and literary criticism, Capriolo has established herself firmly in the European literary scene; and with several of her novels translated into English, her reputation is also growing in England and the United States.
Capriolo's 1995 novel, La spettatrice, was translated in 1998 as The Woman Watching, a “witty, psychologically astute gothic tale," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, that “chronicles the ruin of two young actors in a provincial Italian theater troupe at the beginning of the century." The same reviewer went on to note that the book is both a “complex reworking of the Narcissus myth" as well as an “allegory of the late of the theater under modernism." The story focuses on the actor Vulpius who becomes obsessed with a woman watching his performance in a play about the life of Casanova. Vulpius thereafter uses his long-neglected lover Dora as his stand-in. so that he might have the same view of himself that the anonymous and mysterious woman does. For Susann Cokal, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, “the real power of [the novel] lies in Capriolo's tracing of the psychological effects of the ghost-muse woman's manifestation has on these two lives.''
Capozzi also recommended the 2001 novel Una di loro, with its similarities to Thomas Mann, especially to his Death in Venice and the narrator Asehenbach’s fixation on the young Tadzio. In Capriolo's novel, it is the unnamed, middle-aged critic narrator who becomes obsessed with Claudia in this novel of “self-awareness and metamorphosis," as Capozzi wrote.
Capriolo is also the author of Un uomo di carattere, translated into English as A Man of Character. This is the story of Erasmo Stiler, an engineer who inherits a rundown villa and, in the process of trying to create a private version of Versailles there, destroys himself. A cautionary tale of man's desire to tame the chaos, the novel deals with large ideas, as do all the works of Capriolo. In this case, she plumbs the relationship between art and nature and investigates the importance of living one's life as a moral project. A further title translated into English is Vissi d'amove, published as Floria Tosca, “an exquisite melodrama which uses Puccini's Tosca as its palimpsest," according to Capozzi.
(Based on Puccini's opera, Floria Tosca reinterprets for t...)
1997Paola Capriolo wrote several books on segregation. She is concerned about the topic of racism and counter-measures to it.
Quotes from others about the person
“Of all the new writers who have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Italy, [she] stands unquestionably at the top of the list." - Rocoo Capozzi