Shadows of Rome
A Memoir
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Shadows of Rome
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Narrated by:
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David Downie
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By:
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David Downie
About this listen
WAR AND LOVE FROM ITALY TO CALIFORNIA
An extravagant neo-baroque artist and outspoken proto-feminist, the mercurial Romana Laura Anzi survived Mussolini and the Nazis, risked her life carrying messages for the Italian Resistance, and wound up marrying a wisecracking bespectacled GI journalist who fought in the Italian Campaign then stayed on in Rome to woo her.
Romana was the author’s mother. The GI—Charles E. Downie, Jr.—was his father.
Ranging from the Dolomites in World War One to Rome in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, then to San Francisco and Berkeley in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Shadows of Rome tells the bittersweet tale of this unlikely mid-20th-century Italian-American couple and their unusual offspring.
With wry humor and philosophical detachment, in this moving memoir acclaimed travel writer and novelist David Downie relives his own roller-coaster youth in California and Italy, evoking among the memoir’s many quirky characters his high-color Italian uncles and larger-than-life grandfather, an antifascist lawyer and freemason tortured and ruined by Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts.
Without trying to be, Shadows of Rome is disconcertingly topical in Trump’s America.