Casa Rossa
by Francesca Marciano
(Pantheon, 2002)
This is the mesmerizing story of three generations of a 20th-century Italian family. Casa Rossa, a red farmhouse in Apulia, belongs to Alina Strada. As she prepares the house to be sold, she pieces together the fragments of her family’s past and the lives of three extraordinary women. Encompassing World War II, la dolce vita of Rome in the 1950s, the political instability and terrorism of the 1970s, and the New York City art world of the 1908s, it projects the consequences of family secrets, explores human emotions and evokes remarkable images of Italy.