Author(s): Francesca Marciano

Fiction

Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a magnificent farmhouse standing amidst the olive groves of Puglia. The house is being sold and Alina, the daughter entrusted with packing up, is piecing together the fragments of her family's past. Her grandmother, Renee, a beautiful Tunisian pied noir, muse and model to Alina's painter grandfather, left him for a woman and fled to Germany. Her mother Alba marries a melancholic screenwriter, who dies in mysterious circumstances. And then there is her sister Isabella, once her best friend, who becomes a stranger, caught up in a bitter fight for a dangerous ideology. The sisters' love for each other is always precarious, and in time shifts to a betrayal of which they can never speak. A haunting story of what happens when family secrets collide with history, CASA ROSSA moves from the duplicity of Italy's role in the 1930s to the dark years of Red Brigade terrorism in the seventies.