Quando tornerò- Marco Balzano (2021)
Story of Daniela, a Romanian mother, who leaves her family to work in Italy. Her family is an unemployed husband and two adolescent children- Angelica and Manuel. Her husband then finds work as a long haul trucker to various countries and essentially leaves the kids in the care of the grandparents. The book is divided into sections. The first is written from the son’s point of view, until he has an accident and is unconscious. The second is written from the mom’s point of view, describing her leaving Romania and finding work in Italy, and then her return and waiting by her son’s bed where she recounts much of her story while he is in a coma. The third part is after the son wakes up and is told by the daughter.
The story deals with the difficulties of leaving a family with the goal of finding work to support the family. It touches on the struggles of the one who leaves as well as those left behind.
Italy in the Central Middle Ages: 1000-1300 – Oxford History
As with the earlier book in this series, this is a collection of longer essays, each covering the time period of the book, but focused on particular areas: Cities and communes, Law and Monarchy in the South, Papal Italy, the Rise of the Signori, Trade and Navigation, Material Life, Rural Italy, the Family, Language and Culture, the Italian other: Greeks, Muslims, and Jews, and Sardinia and Italy.
Pachinko- Min Jin Lee (2017)
“People are rotten everywhere you go. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
This is a really compelling story of a Korean/Japanese family. Starting in 1910 to 1989, it narrates how a working class Korean family ends up immigrating to Japan in the colonial period, and the difficulties of being the foreigner in a new land, and the struggles of integration into the new culture. How much does the immigrant Korean family hold on to its old culture and how much does it attempt to become Japanese? How much does the process happen automatically? How do the people around the immigrants treat them and react to them? These are questions that run under the surface of the personal stories that are compelling in themselves. The stories cover 4 generations.
Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300-1550- Oxford History
11 essays covering the state of the Italian peninsula from the years 1300 – 1550. Italy passed from the city-state republican era to city-states led by Signorie.
Rebecca- Daphne du Maurier (1938)
I started reading this story and thought… this seems familiar… only to remember that I had seen the movie version with Armie Hammer and Lily James. I didn’t remember a ton of the movie, but as the plot was unfolding it started coming back to me. It’s a kind of psychological thriller on the face of it, but as I understand it, there was also an autobiographical undercurrent too as the author was wrestling with different aspects of her own personality. Good story though and I read it in 3 days.
Early Modern Italy: 1550-1796- Oxford History
This is the fourth in the seven-book series covering Italian history after the fall of the western Roman empire. The fifth covers 1796-1900, and the sixth covers 1900-1945, and the last covers from 1945 to 2000. I’ll read those at some point, but this will be the last of the series I read before heading to Rome at the end of November.
This one covers the time from the Spanish invasion of Italy until Napoleon entered Italy.
The book is 12 different essays written by various authors covering the institutional framework, the material life, ideologies and practices, and the challenge of the old regime.
Risorgimento- Lucy Riall (2009)
This is a book covering not only the historical events that led to the unification of Italy, but how those events were viewed by Italian historians.