Alfonsina Storni was born in Capriasca, Switzerland, on May 29, 1892, later emigrating to Argentina as a child.
Alfonsina Storni was born on May 29, 1892, in the small Swiss town of Capriasca, in the canton of Ticino, to Italian-Swiss parents Paulina Storni and Alfonso Storni. Her family had previously lived in Argentina, where her father ran a small business, and they returned to Switzerland briefly before Alfonsina's birth.
When she was still a young child, around age three or four, her family emigrated back to Argentina, settling first in San Juan and later in Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe. This migration placed her within the vibrant, immigrant-shaped cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century Argentina, a country then absorbing waves of European immigrants and undergoing rapid modernization.
Her modest and often financially strained upbringing—her father struggled with alcoholism and the family business failed—forced young Alfonsina to work from an early age, including as a waitress in her mother's café and later in a factory. Despite these hardships, she displayed an early passion for literature and performance, joining a traveling theater troupe as a teenager. This unconventional and difficult childhood would deeply inform the themes of poverty, gender inequality, and resilience that later defined her poetic voice, making her eventual rise as one of Latin America's foremost modernist poets all the more remarkable.
Images
