Recommendsday: Books set in Italy

It’s Easter this weekend, and so I’m going with a slightly tangential theme for this week’s recommendsday – books set in Italy, as that’s where the Pope hangs out, and you know that’s enough for a link for me at the moment!

Let’s start with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is about the childhood of two friends in Naples in the 1950s. The identity of the author is a mystery and many say that’s because the book seems so real it must be autobiographical. It’s the first of four books – I have the others still to read and I really must try to get to them soon. The Naples of this book is the opposite of the glamorous Italy you often see in films but it’s fascinating and engrossing.

Talking of the glamorous romantic view of Italy, that’s exactly why the women in The Enchanted April go to Italy in Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1920s novel. I’ve written about it before because it’s right in my wheelhouse, with a medieval castle and four very different women decamping from their normal lives looking for a change in a holiday to the Italian riviera.

Talking of medieval, and another book I’ve mentioned before – Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose which is a murder mystery set in a monastery with a legendary library. I read it as part of my degree, and you should all be glad that I’m recommending this and not Machiavelli’s The Prince, which I also read as part of the same module! Catch-22 was assigned reading for another module but again I really liked it (I did not like the Seven Pillars of Wisdom which was another assigned book for that one) although Heller’s novel is more about the madness and tragedy of war and just happens to be taking place (mainly) in Italy.

I read this a very long time ago, and haven’t been back since, but I’m still going to mention Anthony Capella’s debut, The Food of Love, which is a Cyrano de Bergerac sort of twist about an American woman visiting Rome and falling in love with a man who cooks for her. Except who is really cooking the food?

I’ve been trying to think if I have read any romances set in Italy but my mind is inexplicably blank, so if that comes back to me, I’ll do a follow up I guess. I do have a bunch of books set in Italy on the tbr pile – including some murder mystery and a few historical fiction novels too.

Happy Reading!