Drusilla Tanzi
Italian writer (1885–1963)
Drusilla Tanzi (5 April 1885 – 20 October 1963) was an Italian writer who was born and died in Milan.
Life and career
Tanzi was the daughter of the socialist lawyer Carlo Tanzi. She was a niece of Eugenio Tanzi, sister of Lidia and Silvio Tanzi, and (via Lidia) aunt of Natalia Ginzburg.
She first became the wife of the art historian Matteo Marangoni and later the poet and Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale. She married for the second time in 1958 only after her first husband's death that same year, even though she had been living with Montale long before that time.
Tanzi was nicknamed "Mosca" (fly) because of her thick glasses to correct a strong myopia.
She has been called a "muse of Montale" who dedicated two sections of his 1971 poetry collection Satura to her. According to Ahern, writing about Montale:In 1927 the 30-year-old poet fell in love with Drusilla Tanzi, the wife of an eminent Italian art critic. Myopic, not beautiful, overbearing, she remained the central woman of his life until her death.The two met after Montale moved to Florence to pursue his poetry and he moved into the home she shared with her husband and the critic, Marangoni. Tanzi and the poet soon became lovers and moved in together on via Duca di Genova.
“Drusilla Tanzi” enters the record as italian writer (1885–1963). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Drusilla, Tanzi and Italian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3715573. VIAF identifies the subject as 8636150033012711180007. The Library of Congress control number is no2017089936. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1885, 1963, 1958 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Drusilla Tanzi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.