Once Too Radical for Italy, Goliarda Sapienza Is Belatedly Getting Her Due The Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996). Unconventional and independent, she found the pretension and ideological orthodoxy of the postwar Italian intelligentsia suffocating. Years after her death, her books are being republished and she is now considered a feminist icon in her native country.Credit...Archivio Sapienza Pellegrino By Anna Momigliano May 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET Goliarda Sapienza yearned for an audience. An actress turned writer at the cusp of middle age, and now considered a feminist icon in her native Italy, she felt that telling one’s story is what gives existence meaning. “Life is always a novel left unwritten if we leave it buried inside of us, and I believe in literature,” she wrote in