Casa Rossa Book

A mesmerizing story of three generations of a twentieth-century Italian family.

Casa Rossaâ??a farmhouse in Puglia owned by the Strada familyâ??is being sold. And as she packs up the house, Alina Strada pieces together the history of her familyâ??s past, and of the lives of three extraordinary Strada women.

Grandmother Renée, a beautiful Tunisian, is wife, muse, and model for Alinaâ??s painter grandfather, but she leaves him and flees to Nazi Germany. Alinaâ??s mother, Alba, marries a melancholic screenwriter and lives la dolce vita in 1950s Rome until her husbandâ??s mysterious death. Isabella, Alinaâ??s sister and once her best friend, finds herself drawn to a dangerous ideology in the 1970s; the sistersâ?? love for one another soon shifts to a betrayal of which they can never speak. As these individual lives unfold, so does the larger oneâ??the story of a family whose secrets collide with history.

From the duplicity of Italyâ??s role in the thirties to the dark years of terrorism in our own times, and moving from Rome and Southern Italy to New England and New York City, Casa Rossa is a brilliant weave of lives and memories: an enthralling novel.