Abstract:

Itala Bogdanović (1874-1945), the painter and writer from Zadar, belongs to a group of writers who created their works in the Italian language, in a milieu of centenary relations between Croatian and Italian cultures. Although her name has not been registered in literary history, mostly because of the fact that her literary works remained unpublished, by her activity and modern approach to life she contributed to the introduction of the European spirit to the cultural life of Zadar at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century. She is also important because of the fact that a woman writer, a phenomenon already frequent in the European literature, was rather rare in the context of the Zadar and Dalmatian literature at the time. The introduction deals with bio-bibliographic data about Itala Bogdanović and her literary heritage which is conserved among the manuscripts of the Scientific Library of Zadar. It consists of a drama, a volume of poetry, an autobiography and a lexicon Donne illustri (1915-1917) consisting of 900 biographies of the world's famous women of all times. By analyzing the parts of the lexicon dedicated to famous Croatian women and those from the Eastern Adriatic coast, the author of the article tries to find out which works of Dalmatian historiography were used as sources by Itala Bogdanović, and emphasizes the importance that she gives to those women in the history of Croatian-Italian cultural relations and in the history of European and world's culture in general, by including them among the 900 most famous women of the world.

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