A revenge of extraordinary women, who inhabit these pages with their stories, sometimes exciting, sometimes tragic, arousing indignation or inspiring noble feelings, but most of all touching.

Since forever, Muses are necessary. But if at the dawn of civilization poets invoked goddesses to get inspiration, over time the role of the Muse has been entrusted to mortal women. Loved, wanted, abandoned, idolized, painted on beautiful canvases, sung in unforgettable verses, carved in incredible shapes but always as – albeit gorgeous – objects, whose human dimension could be easily overlooked. Instead they were flesh-andblood women, with dreams, passions, impulses and life, a lot of life.

Serena Dandini shifts the gaze on them and, as Copernicus, makes a revolution putting back the Muse at the center of her universe, finally subject and no longer object.

Dandini ranges between ages and places, from the Baroque Rome to the swinging London, from the inflamed South America of the Nineteenth century’s uprisings to the glittering Los Angeles of the 1970s, through the Paris of the avant-garde.

Often starting from her own life and experience, alternating epic and irony, Dandini connects Marianne Faithfull, and her neverending resistance skill, to Anita Garibaldi and her warrior endeavours; Colette, who regained the frutis of her genius from her husband, to Sophie Germain and the other female scientists dispossessed from their male colleagues; Eve Babitz, who was a muse to painters and rockstars, but above all was a great writer herself, to Gala who finally made
“Musism” an art.

SERENA DANDINI, born in Rome, is an author, television host and writer. All of her books have had great success; among these, Nothing comes from diamonds. Stories of life and gardens (Rizzoli 2011), Fatally wounded (with Maura Misiti, Rizzoli 2013), We’ll always have Paris. Sentimental walks in alphabetic disorder (Rizzoli 2016), The catalogue of heroic women (Mondadori 2018), The Führer’s bathtub (Einaudi 2020) and Chronicles from Paradise (Einaudi 2022). She is art director of the festival “L’eredità delle donne” (Women’s inheritance) that takes place in November in Florence and is now at its sixth edition. For the last two years, she has been going back and forth across Italy with her play Vieni avanti, cretina! (Come along, you idiot!).