Luciana Percovich

Luciana Percovich (born 25 July 1947) is an Italian non-fiction writer, a teacher, a translator and director of a series of books on women's history and spirituality. She was born in Gorizia, Italy in a Mitteleuropean Italian speaking family forced to leave Fiume, Rijeka at the end of World War II, with cultural and geographical roots in Austria and Dalmatia, she spent her childhood and adolescence in Gorizia attending Classical studies. At the age of 18, she went to Milan to complete her education, and there she graduated in 1972 (Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne – Università degli Studi di Milano). She has been defined as "a traveller between worlds and a weaver of space-time connections for her ability of embracing distant wide horizons with a loving insight". Whatever I've done, it's been conceived within women's relations, in presence of women's bodies and in the flowing of awakened women's emotions. Since then, she lived and worked in Milano as a teacher, a translator, an author and an activist in many pioneering projects of the Women's Movement (women's health centers, bookshops, cultural and political training, publishing houses, etc.). During the university years, marked by the students' movement of 1968, she met the first women's consciousness rising groups which were bringing their critic to the core of the social economic and political structure. Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) by Eva Figes, one of the first feminist texts to be read in Italy, was for her a turning point. She joined Lotta Femminista, a group investigating the invisible economic role of female unpaid work, and soon after a collective on female body and health. They produced and published on their own Anticoncezionali dalla parte della donna (Birth control from the Women's side, 1974, translated in Portuguese in 1978), opened one of the first women's health clinics in a popular district of Milano, introduced the self-help practice brought to Italy from Los Angeles and by the Boston Women's Health Collective.