Do you see this woman? She was mocked, insulted, humiliated, criticized by everyone because she was born a WOMAN!
Her name was Grazia, Grazia Deledda. At nine, her parents told her it was time to leave school. Simple, "because you're a girl." But Grazia refused to let anyone walk all over her. She continued studying on her own. "You need heart, nothing else," she would say years later. Because we're not made to suffer, but to shine. And then finally someone noticed her: they published one of her stories!
Grazia is overjoyed, but everyone is crying foul. Her neighbors, the parish priest, her own family! Women are supposed to take care of the house, that's what she's told. So she flees to Rome, but nothing changes. Roman intellectuals despise her, critics don't take her seriously. She was a woman. And uneducated at that! One day she meets a kind and somewhat strange man, or so the others say, named Palmiro.
"You will be loved the day you can show your weakness, without the other using it to assert their strength." Palmiro is not only happy to have a wife who is a writer, but he quits his job to act as his agent. They become the laughing stock of the city. A woman writer and a man who puts himself at her service! Has anything more absurd ever been seen? But Grazia is undaunted. She continues to write about women who fight and don't give up, about men who love too much or too little, about those who chase the moon and those who truly speak to it. Because the most important things in life don't need words. "They are said in silence instead."
Her stories travel the world. And then comes the long-awaited recognition. It's 1926. Grazia Deledda, the first and only Italian woman in history, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. A small Sardinian woman with barely a fifth-grade education. As she takes the stage, she is hand in hand with her husband, the man who believed in her and stood by her despite everything and everyone. Because this is what love is: holding each other through the storm. And to you, Grazia, I want to say thank you: for showing me that we women can and must shine. Always.

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