THE ITALIAN PARTY by
THE ITALIAN PARTY is a sneaky book: half glamorous fun, half an examination of America's role
in the world. When Scottie and Michael Messina arrive in Siena, Italy during
When
Scottie’s Italian teacher, a teenager with secrets of his own, goes
missing, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths
about herself, her husband, and her country.
Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he
begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart
by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of
history, memory, hate, and love to a new kind of
complicated truth.
Filled with sun-dappled pasta lunches, Prosecco, handsome locals, and horse racing, The Italian Party is a smart pleasure reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented
Mr. Ripley. Complete with history, espionage, and intrigue, there’s something for all readers to love in this book.
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Because I spent
seven years in Italy, four of them in Tuscany, it wasn’t hard to conjure the
landscapes on the page, even though the book takes place in the summer of 1956,
before I was born. The nice thing about Italy is that it doesn’t change too
quickly. I did have to research the fifties, though—what people were wearing,
talking about, the major news events. I chose 1956 because it was a year of
upheaval in the Cold War. In January of that year Kruschev denounced Stalin,
which was so secret it didn’t even get out to the west until June. That seemed
to indicate that there would be a thaw in the tensions between the US and the
Soviet Union. In Italy, the two superpowers were trying to influence Italian
politics in ways that will sound eerily familiar to Americans in 2018: using
large scale PR campaigns, running news stories true and false, influencing
public opinion through prominent people, and a lot of good old-fashioned
bribery. Communism was very popular in Italy, but in October the brutal Soviet
putdown of the Hungarian uprising shifted Italians away from an alliance with
the Soviets. I was interested in the summer between those two events, and
exploring the anxieties underneath the beautiful Tuscan landscape.
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Inspiration for The Italian Party: Secrets and Glamor in the 1950s
There were two key points of inspiration
for The Italian Party. One was that
my parents set off for South America in the 1950s, soon after they were
married. I never got a chance to really ask them what that was like, and I’ve
never been to South America, so the second, and more important, inspiration was
my own experience moving to Italy in 1987, when I was 22.
I was working as a
journalist for W, Women’s Wear Daily,
and two other magazines that are now defunct, M and Scene. I didn’t
speak Italian, and I thought there would be a period of training, but instead
on my first day on the job I was sent to Florence to cover an underwear fair.
It was a sort of trial by fire for someone with terminal shyness and social
anxiety. I had to stalk the hallways of the Fortezza da Basso, listening for
people speaking English, and ask them what they were buying to stock their
retail stores back home: corsets, brassieres, boxers? I survived, barely, and
the story ran on the front page of WWD, and it was all easier after that.
Because I spent
seven years in Italy, four of them in Tuscany, it wasn’t hard to conjure the
landscapes on the page, even though the book takes place in the summer of 1956,
before I was born. The nice thing about Italy is that it doesn’t change too
quickly. I did have to research the fifties, though—what people were wearing,
talking about, the major news events. I chose 1956 because it was a year of
upheaval in the Cold War. In January of that year Kruschev denounced Stalin,
which was so secret it didn’t even get out to the west until June. That seemed
to indicate that there would be a thaw in the tensions between the US and the
Soviet Union. In Italy, the two superpowers were trying to influence Italian
politics in ways that will sound eerily familiar to Americans in 2018: using
large scale PR campaigns, running news stories true and false, influencing
public opinion through prominent people, and a lot of good old-fashioned
bribery. Communism was very popular in Italy, but in October the brutal Soviet
putdown of the Hungarian uprising shifted Italians away from an alliance with
the Soviets. I was interested in the summer between those two events, and
exploring the anxieties underneath the beautiful Tuscan landscape.
So in the end I
took all of those elements that intrigued and inspired me—American newlyweds in
the 1950s, Italy, social anxiety, romance, language barriers and Cold War
tensions and spycraft—and tossed them together like a nice bowl of pasta. The
result was The Italian Party. Buon
appetito!