Fuga ed esilio di Mayy Ziyāda (Nazareth 1886 – Il Cairo 1941)

The life of Mayy Ziyāda, a complex – and still underestimated - intellectual figure at the time of the Nahḍa or Arab «renaissance», appears in many ways a gradual and necessary flight from the world and, at the same time, a progressive refinement of the sensibility. From her birth in Nazareth, her youth amid the nationalist and anti-British agitation in Cairo, a cosmopolitan and multicultural city, to her hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital in Beirut, then finally back to Cairo where she died in utter solitude, Mayy Ziyāda’s wide and varied literary production speaks for those who, fleeing from themselves and from the emotions of a world at once changing and resisting change, are foreigners everywhere, forever «in the wrong place».