(by Alessandra Baldini) (ANSA) - ROME, NOV 25 - The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women which every year celebrates 25 November was inspired by a novel and talks about it Julia Alvarez, author of "Il Tempo delle Farfalle ", who in 1994, telling the story of the Mirabal sisters, killed on 25 November 1960 for having participated in the resistance against the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, gave way to a movement that today illuminates the cities and squares of Italy and the rest of the world with red grew up obsessed with that story. We and the Mirabals, families of only daughters, but we were the surviving sisters, they were our shadow and what could have happened to us had we stayed. My father was part of the same underground network, but from a different cell.
We ran away in August of that year, I was 10 years old, and terrible after the Mirabal sisters had died to free our country ", the writer tells ANSA from her home in Vermont:" I felt that someone had to tell their story.
When I learned that there was another surviving sister, and that, like me, she was the second of four, I felt that it had to be me. "After" Time of the Butterflies ", Alvarez wrote other novels, the latest," Beyond. "just published in Italy by Black Coffee, tells the story of Antonia Vega, recently retired after years of teaching, as she did, in a college in Vermont, whose life takes a sharp turn when suddenly her beloved husband Sam dies and a Mexican girl pregnant and undocumented knocks on her door. "Beyond", after 15 years of books for young adults, marks a turning point for 71-year-old Alvarez: direct fiction for elderly readers struggling with all the problems of aging. " uncharted territory,in which the protagonist is an elderly woman. We all grow old but few become "elder", elders of a tribe, a community. I wanted to understand, experience and integrate these issues into my life before writing about them. That's why, as I explained to my editor, it took 15 years to do it ". (ANSA).