Ti ho sposato per allegria

"I married you for joy" is the first of the eleven comedies by Natalia Ginzburg. She wrote it in 1965, two years after winning the Strega Prize with her masterpiece "Family Lexicon". The work contains the themes that characterize most of her production: love, the dynamics of couple life, mothers, death, and social inequality. And the writer talks about it almost without discussing it, letting the stories themselves, seemingly simple and familiar, reveal their depth and brilliance.

The two protagonists, Pietro and Giuliana, question how their marriage might work, wondering if they will ever be truly happy together; after all, they barely know each other and wouldn't be able to justify what led them to marry (she is a stray girl on the brink of suicide, he is certainly not rich in feelings, torn between a nonconformity he is attracted to and the bourgeois cage he finds himself in).

The work clearly conveys the detachment from the feelings of all the characters, reminiscent of the Chekhov that Ginzburg adored. None of them seems moved by empathy towards the other; everything seems to either stand or collapse under the poorly tolerated obligations of family and bourgeois ties. It is not a comedic text thanks to witty jokes or funny gags, but rather due to the rhythm, effective dialogues, and almost absurd but absolutely recognizable characters.