Read your way through Italy
The right book can carry you to Italy in an afternoon, and set the mood for the real thing when you finally arrive.
As avid readers, we’ve selected a few of our favourite books that immerse you into Italian life.
The Enchanted April
I picked this up in Holland Park Daunts bookshop on a rainy April lunch break and it was perfect escapism. It’s about a group of dissatisfied Englishwomen escaping their post-war lives by answering a newspaper advertisment and end up renting an Italian villa on the Portofino coastline for the month of April, expecting only rest and solitude.
Instead, the sunshine and beauty of the setting slowly softens them all, mending marriages and friendships they had almost given up on. It’s a great book about rediscovery.
Still Life
I can’t wait to re-read this book, I enjoyed it that much. A must read for Florence lovers. In 1944 Tuscany, young soldier Ulysses Temper shares a chance wartime encounter with art historian Evelyn Skinner, a meeting that quietly shapes the rest of his life.
Decades later, an inheritance draws him back to Florence with his unconventional found family, and the novel follows them through love, loss and the 1966 Arno flood as art and friendship carry them through.
My Brilliant Friend
I read this close to where it is set - in the bubbling hot city of Naples, which it gave it’s superb writing added ressonnance. This is the first novel of a trilogy set in a poor but vibrant Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, Ten-year-olds Elena and Lila form a fierce, complicated friendship that will go onto shape the rest of their lives.
Across nearly sixty years this acclaimed novel follows the two women through school, marriage and motherhood, using their bond to trace how a changing Italy reshapes both the friendship and themselves. With over 20 million copies sold, this is a modern classic.
The Marriage Portrait
This story builds slowly and menacingly. We follow fifteen-year-old Lucrezia de' Medici who’s thrust into an arranged marriage with Alfonso II of Ferrara after her sister's sudden death, and finds herself isolated in an unfamiliar court far from Florence.
As pressure mounts to produce an heir, she becomes convinced her charming husband means to kill her. It’s an evocative reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in deadly danger.
Love From Venice
I adored this book. We follow twenty-five-year-old Gill Johnson, who left her job at London's National Gallery to teach English to an aristocratic Venetian family in the 1950s, partly to impress a man she was chasing to Paris. Drawing on her own letters from that summer, she perfectly captures the foibles of Venice's wealthy social circles at the tail end of the Grand Tour era. Based on her own experiences, it is a remarkable look at life of the European jet set.
The Glass Maker
Another Venice recommendation - this is a love letter to Le Serenissima as we skip through time from the 1400s up to to 2019, when Venice was severely flooded - a day I remember well as I was myself in Florence train station trying to get to Venice that rainy day. In this novel, we follow the life of Orsola Rosso as she secretly teaches herself the family's forbidden glassmaking craft after her father's death.
Through her descendants, the story cleverly skims across six centuries of plague, invasion and Venice's transformation into a tourist city, weaving an unbroken thread of craft, love and family loyalty.
Murder on Lake Garda
This one is for fans of the classic murder mystery, which had me hooked to the end.
The scene is set at a lavish wedding on a private island in Lake Garda when it’s interrupted by a scream, and the celebration turns to horror when a murder is discovered among the guests.
Trapped on the island with the killer still at large, one of the wedding guests, Robyn, must untangle a web of family secrets to find the culprit before they strike again.
All books can be found on our new Bookshop.org page.
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