First published in 1921, 'Stella mattutina' is Ada Negri’s bildungsroman, based partly on the circumstances of her own life as the daughter of a single-mother working in a factory. With a poet’s sensitivity, the adult narrator looks back on her slow awakening to the vicissitudes of life and the imagination in late nineteenth-century Italy.
"The verses will not stay fixed in her brain. They seem to stay hovering in the air, by enchantment, confused with the warmth of the sun, the perfume of the acacias, the happy buzzing of the bees. She imagines a beautiful thing that smiles upon her. No poet has written these verses. They sprang into being miraculously of themselves, in the souls and on the lips of mankind, on a morning in May. They are like the air, they are an element, one can sink oneself in them."
**Ada Negri** (February 3, 1870-January 11, 1945) was born in Lodi, near Milan, to poor parents. After completing her schooling she took a position as a schoolteacher in 1888 in the village of Motta-Visconti. The publication of her first poetry collection *Fatalita* (1892) brought recognition to Negri as a poet of socialist tendencies and exceptional gifts. She continued to write and publish for the rest of her adult life, both poetry and imaginative prose. These works notably include *Tempeste* (1896), *Maternita* (1904), *Esilio* (1914),* Il libro di Mara* (1919), *Finestre alte* (1923), *I canti dell'isola* (1925), and *Il dono* (1936). She died in Milan at the age of seventy-four.