Born Rina Faccio in Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, on 14 August 1876; she later adopted the pen name Sibilla Aleramo.
Sibilla Aleramo, born Rina Faccio on 14 August 1876 in Alessandria, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, would go on to become one of the most important feminist voices in modern Italian literature.
She was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family; her father was an engineer and later a factory manager, which took the family to Milan and then to the small town of Civitanova Marche in the Marche region. This provincial, patriarchal environment would later become the backdrop against which she measured her own rebellion.
Her early life was marked by intellectual promise cut short: she was a bright student but was forced to abandon formal schooling at a young age to help support the family, a common fate for girls of her era and class. At only fifteen or sixteen, she was raped by a colleague of her father and subsequently pressured into marrying him, an event that set the course for the autobiographical novel that would make her famous. The trauma and confinement of this early marriage became the seed of her literary and feminist consciousness, which she articulated decades later under the name Sibilla Aleramo, a pseudonym she adopted around 1906 evoking the mythic Sibyl and a medieval ancestor, symbolically severing ties with her birth name and the identity imposed upon her.