SHADOWS OF ROME

A MEMOIR, COMING SOON

WAR ANDLOVE 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 wasthe author’s mother. The GI—Charles E. Downie, Jr.—was his father.

Ranging fromthe Dolomites in World War One to Rome in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, then to SanFrancisco and Berkeley in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Shadows of Rometells the bittersweet tale of this unlikely mid-20th-centuryItalian-American couple and their unusual offspring.

With wryhumor and philosophical detachment, in the pages of this moving memoir acclaimedtravel writer and novelist David Downie relives his own roller-coaster youth inCalifornia and Italy, evoking among the memoir’s many quirky characters hishigh-color Italian uncles and larger-than-life grandfather, an antifascistlawyer and freemason tortured and ruined by Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts.