Shadows of Rome

A Memoir

De: David Downie

Narrado por: David Downie

WAR AND LOVE FROM ITALY TO CALIFORNIA

An extravagant neo-baroque artist and outspoken proto-feminist, the mercurial Romana Laura Anzi survived Mussolini and the Nazis, risked her life carrying messages for the Italian Resistance, and wound up marrying a wisecracking bespectacled GI journalist who fought in the Italian Campaign then stayed on in Rome to woo her.

Romana was the author’s mother. The GI—Charles E. Downie, Jr.—was his father.

Ranging from the Dolomites in World War One to Rome in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, then to San Francisco and Berkeley in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Shadows of Rome tells the bittersweet tale of this unlikely mid-20th-century Italian-American couple and their unusual offspring.

With wry humor and philosophical detachment, in this moving memoir acclaimed travel writer and novelist David Downie relives his own roller-coaster youth in California and Italy, evoking among the memoir’s many quirky characters his high-color Italian uncles and larger-than-life grandfather, an antifascist lawyer and freemason tortured and ruined by Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts.

Without trying to be, Shadows of Rome is disconcertingly topical in Trump’s America.

©2024 David Downie (P)2025 David Downie

Shadows of Rome—an appreciation

Reading like a novel, this many-faceted memoir courses through the last hundred years weaving the saga of a family with roots on both sides of the Atlantic. Its scion, the author David Downie, opens this singular tale searching the cemetery of a remote village in northern Italy, for the elusive tomb of his maternal grandfather, Alessandro Anzi. We learn that he had been a highly successful, larger-than-life figure, amassing a fortune then squandering it at gambling tables in Montecarlo. During World War I, he commanded a frontline detachment in the Alps. There, in the midst of brutal warfare, his aide-de-camp Alfredo invented Fettuccine Alfredo.

A few pages and a half-century later, we race up and down the hills of San Francisco with Alessandro’s effervescent daughter Romana, Downie’s mother. She’s at the wheel of a two-seater convertible, top down, radio blaring, her three young sons packed in, ecstatic as they fly along at twice the “stupid American” speed limit.

How did this free-spirited, quintessentially Mediterranean woman make a life on the laid-back coast of California? Downie recounts the wartime origins of a seemingly fated love story. A sobersided midwestern GI falls hard for a bewitching young artist barely out of her teens (see the book cover.) Their paths cross in Rome, her newly liberated hometown, in 1944. He, a newspaper man from Kansas and she, an art instructor covertly carrying messages for the Italian Resistance. Both have been in combat; both have risked and have witnessed death. But when they meet at an art class for American soldiers, the seeds of their life together are sown.

Downie has exhaustively researched this book, traveling to the lands of his forebears, unearthing ancient archives, combing through voluminous correspondence, deciphering forgotten photographs. His book also provides a valuable observation on the “war brides” phenomenon and the bicultural progeny that they raised. All in all, “Shadows of Rome”, packed with colorful anecdotes and astute commentaries, presents in factual historic context a baroque family epic that frequently and delightfully borders on the fantastic.

Absolutely mind bending

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir. It was fascinating in every way(1) characters, (2) settings and (3) loaded with historical facts and references. David shares the story with total candor and a subtle sense of humor and tragidy