Title: The Italian Wife
Author: Kate Furnivall
Genre: Historical fiction
Setting: Italy
The
Italian Wife is set in 1932 in the midst of Mussolini’s hunger for a new
Fascist Italy. In a fictional town named Bellina, an addition to the five
cities Il Deuce built after draining Italy ’s
Pontine Marshes in the 1930s. It was an
engineering feat that actually employed 124,000 men in 1933. In this intriguing
tale, a woman Isabella Berotti is one of the famed architects, the only female.
She focuses all her attention on her work relishing the transformation of the
town built on the once mosquito infested marshland. She was married to one of
Mussolini’s infamous soldiers, the Blackshirts.