graziella

Graziella (same title in the original French) is a novel by Alphonse de Lamartine of 1852, inspired by his first youth trip to Italy in 1811-1812.

Forced on Procida island by a storm, he knows Graziella, daughter of a Neapolitan fisherman.

The two love each other a love pure and, after some ups, they live a few months happy next to the one to the other.

But soon the poet has to return to France, where he receives a letter from the young lover, affected by a deadly disease.

Lively expression of the sensibility and the rhetoric of French romanticism, Graziella is the most famous prose by Lamartine, suspended between literary stereotypes, intimate emotion and sincere involvement.

Graziella has become a myth, so much so that her image as female of Procida cheerful, simple and beautiful, gives the name to a beauty pageant in Procida during the feast of summer festival, where it is elected, every summer, a "Graziella", dressed in typical costume from 1939.