Aaron, Moses
Aaron, Ron
Adesida, Dotun
Al-Assady, Abdul-Settar
Banerjee, Arunabh
Baraka, Ahmed
Beal, Mark
Binx, Eugene
Bisht, Pushkar
Brown, Dr. Glen
Buck, Gail
Chambers, Eric
Chambers, Lesley
Chappel, T. A.
Chi, Anson
Coakley, Mark
Coelho, Paulo
Culling, Peter
Diwivedi, Tripuresh Dhar
Dufort, Mike
Ebony, Ojo Iredia
Falit, Joseph E.
Fawcett, Shaun
Fitzgerald-Clarke, Michael
Fleming, Suzanne
Fries, Todd
Gheorghiu, Cristache
GOrDon, Gregory
Huchu, Tendai
Izuogu, Victor
Jacobsen, Heidi
King, Nigel
Kumar, G. Ram
Lake, Gina
LaRocca, Kay
Lay, Vicheka
Litt, Dr. Jerome Z.
Majumdar, Pritis Chandra
McCulloch, Iain
Merrow, Liz
Miller, Harley
Maffey, Laura
Maffey, Riccardo
Milazzo, Ronald
Minya, Dzimba
Nath, Bhasurananda
Neo
Nirmala
O'Brien, Benjamin
Okonkwo, Ikechukwu
Patterson, R.J.
Purcar, Gabriela
Ridner, Melanie
Rinaldi, Jacquie
Roberts, Ella
Rutz, Gary
Sharp, Ian
Sooriyarachchi, Janaki
Spudich, Giulietta
Ştef, Dorin
Stull, Blaire
Taylor, Roy
Thomas, Dennis
Thompson, Tantse
Turley, Keith
Vine-Knight, Leo
Watson, Rob
Wear, Milt
Yarbrough, Alan |
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Riccardo Maffey
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Riccardo Maffey, a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, was educated at the London Institute of World Affairs and the University of Essex, where he gained an MA. He has been a London correspondent and foreign editor with several Italian newspapers. He was senior economics editor with the United States Information Service in Rome, worked as a feature writer, commentator and presenter for the BBC Italian Section, and did a lot of broadcasting and interviewing for the Italian Swiss Radio from London, Rome, Dublin, Belfast, and the US.
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 | Works by Riccardo Maffey |  |
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Rome in 1959, just before the release of Fellini’s La dolce vita: the nobles of old and the arrivistes, the snobs and the beautiful people, the cinema and the bigots, the pseudo-intellectuals and the artists. And Giada Rovi-Sanlupi, the moody, unconventional daughter of a papal aristocrat. And Germaine Kenneth, the sophisticated bisexual Shakespearian English actress evocative of Canova’s Venus Victrix. And the pushy, promiscuous showjumper Bea Alemanni. All come together in a psychological piece of fiction where the mal marié Cristiano Belisario, its ‘internal focalizer’, has completed a film dramatization of Pauline Bonaparte’s life only to discover that his individual freedom, both as an ambitious screenwriter and as a passionate man, is like the large looking glass of a small drawing room: it merely gives an illusion of space.
 
Churchill called it a Renaissance tragedy. Indeed, before Count Ciano’s execution by Mussolini, his father-in-law, now head of the Italian Social Republic, only two women attempted his rescue. His wife, Edda, who defied her father, and a female Nazi secret agent, Frau Beetz, who loved him.
Between history and fiction, in the struggle for Ciano’s life and his diaries, an indictment of Hitler and Ribbentrop’s treacheries, is also the son of a cockney and a Roman noblewoman. Carlo Rufus Williams joins the Resistance after the King and his generals abandon Rome to the Germans. With sensuous, leftist, aristocratic Mirta della Rovere, he fights back until a street attack provokes a Nazi massacre in reprisal.
SYNOPSIS
Italy, September 1943–March 1944
From the Armistice with the Allies to the Ardeatina Cave Massacre
Not all of them are cowards. The King and the Italian warlords abandon Rome to the brutality of the German forces, taking refuge with the Allied armies in the South, but a group of men and women—nobles, workers, intellectuals, housewives, and soldiers— don’t run away, and fight hard.
Among them, between history and fiction, is the thirty-four-year-old Carlo Rufus Williams, a cavalry major, a letterato, and a broadcaster in civilian life, born in London the son of a cockney composer and a papal noblewoman. The first of his rank in the history of the Italian Kingdom to take the floor in a Crown Council, he manages to persuade them into declaring the Armistice with the Allies, only to be severely wounded in the battle for Monterotondo against the crack paratroopers of the XI Fliegerkorps (while saving the life of a child used as a shield by the Germans) and find himself held, outside the protection of the Geneva Convention, by the war criminal Kappler.
Intertwined with Carlo’s tangible difficulties are his emotions. The boy he fathered as a teenager and of whom he is so fond has come to his rescue in Monterotondo, without knowing that he is his illegitimate son. An Allied bomb killed Anna, Carlo’s estranged wife, last July, and he still wonders what the hell brought them together years ago. He shares his lover, Christina Branting, with her husband, the creepy Swedish chargé d’affaires in Italy (who will win her back by indulging her sexual fantasies). However, it’s not clear to him whether he is in love with Christina or has a crush on Mirta, the widow of his cousin Leo della Rovere, a show jumper, who dies at Porta St Paul (where the Italians loose the battle for Rome after their CO’s desertion).
In the meantime, Carlo’s old friend Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, the young Italian foreign secretary from 1936 to 1943, is kept by the Nazis in a house near Munich, and then handed over to the Fascists in Verona for his anti-Mussolini vote in July 1943. Aided by Christina, Carlo hides away Ciano’s diaries, which are an indictment of Hitler and Ribbentrop’s treacheries. To obtain them, Kappler grills and threatens Carlo (who also worked for Ciano when Ciano did his bit for keeping Italy out of the conflict) until, fortunately, Christina organizes his escape with the help of Count Ciro Caetani, head of the underground army group.
In the rescue team there is Mirta, disguised as a Red Cross nurse. A pianist and an unconventional left-wing intellectual born into a princely family of the Holy Roman Empire, she has joined the partisans of the Patriotic Action Groups (GAP). Carlo follows suit. He not only gets involved with her in acts of sabotage against the Nazis, but starts a love affair with her, now also attracted to her by her wanton sexuality, as well as by her moral stance. For her anti-Fascism dates back to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, whereas Carlo accepted the regime at least until the Anschluss.
Ciano can only count on the help of two women—Edda, his wife, who sides with him against her father, Mussolini, and Frau Beetz, nicknamed Felicitas, a Nazi secret agent, who has the task of finding the diaries. She has passionately fallen in love with him, and has proposed a swap to her superiors: Ciano’s diaries for his life. So Carlo goes to Verona with the diaries accompanied by Brigitte (Ciro’s half-sister) and makes a pact with the Nazis, to lead the raid on the Italian jail where the Fascists have imprisoned Ciano, and free him. Hitler vetoes the swap at the eleventh hour. The Fascists prosecute and execute Ciano, but Edda, escorted by Carlo, crosses the Swiss border with the diaries (which will be published in America). Ciano dies bravely, turning towards the firing squad to face them.
Back in Rome, after Ciro’s death in the Via Tasso chamber of torture, Carlo takes part with Mirta in the Via Rasella attack against a German column of 23 March 1944, thinking that guerrilla warfare is the only answer to Nazi atrocities. The Fascists arrest him, and Kappler picks him out with over 330 other male hostages. The following day, Carlo is shot in the back of the neck inside the Ardeatina Cave, with the hostages. Before dying, he realizes that both he and Mirta have ended up sharing the same interpretation of Fascism and anti-Fascism, and that between them there is a strong bond of the soul that outlasts everything else: Mirta, he feels sure, will say that his death is a bella morte, a “beautiful death”, even if they kill him like a porker.
An Anglo-Italian reporter is on the news in the Roman summer, but cannot write the story of violence and murder he's unearthed...and in the attempt at patching up his marriage, ends up enacting the drama of his life
Debby is too critical of the Italian way of life to make do with her husband's sexual problems. Paul, an Anglo-Italian reporter with a magazine in Rome, does his best to please her. He is well-meaning and intelligent, but a man also needs willpower and emotional stability, and he has got neither. He is a loser; and indeed when the discovery of a dead man in the boot of a car leads him to unearth the cover-up of a murder, he finds himself unable to win back his wife as well as file the outcome of his investigation for fear of endangering the life of his half-sister, Lelia, who was somewhat involved in the crime. Suspecting that Debby has an affair with a Bosnian, he has a go with another woman, but the weight of his past is too heavy, and they give up. He confides in Lelia—only to realize they have much to share...A palmist dubbed him “a powerful car on the road at night without headlights”. Reminding himself of that metaphor, Paul takes the Via del Mare, driving against the traffic at high speed.
Charming and attractive, with sapphire eyes, Diana Mosley, daughter of the authoritarian
Lord Mitford and wife of the flamboyant Sir Oswald, leader of the British Blackshirts,
was, along with her sister Unity, one of the few women who had a hot line with Adolf Hitler.
Fascinated by his “genius”, and his doctrine of government, she reinforced his false belief
that the quest for peace of the English upper class had undermined their ability to resist
his rapacious plans of invasion. In this reconstruction of her life Riccardo Maffey touches
upon the events and the ideological milieu that led Lady Mosley to tell the Nazi dictator at
the Festspiele in Bayreuth on the verge of the attack on Poland: Führer, the British won't fight.
An English SOE officer and two women cross one another's paths, caught up in a triangle of tension
and the extremes of savagery and heroism displayed by ordinary people during the Nazi occupation
of Italy. Intertwined with the trio's emotions is their inability to prevail over a political
divide that sees human nature at its worst. Daniel cannot persuade the partisan leaders into
handing Mussolini over to the Allies when he is captured. Elena, a painter and a Fascist spy,
sees her German colleague lying on the ground castrated by a partisan commando. Francesca,
a Marxist intellectual, witnesses Mussolini's execution by the leader of the Communist brigades
and can do nothing to prevent the killing of the dictator's mistress. After the German surrender,
Elena is held in the city jail pending trial for war crimes before an Allied Military Court.
Daniel has by now discovered that he is madly in love with two women at once, and takes up her defense.
“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few”, and Rudy Sammarco, a British lawyer of mixed Italo-Somali origin and a writer manqué, will soon discover that nothing is what it seems. His wife, who to all appearances is so attracted to him, has dumped him for a fat cat. Then it’s a coup de foudre with Paola, the graceful, enchanting Tuscan girl with a touch of Renaissance glamour who has just showed up at his office for legal advice as a victim of brutal harassment: but he cannot tell if she too feels for him, or is still bewitched by her psychopathic persecutor, or worse, has had a fling with his own father. He cherishes the memory of his mother, who killed herself, but Rudy wants to know why—because his father walked out on her, or because she loved his uncle, a physician turned herdsman who has downshifted to the countryside? Everybody comes up with a different version of their own biography, and the weight of the uncertainties makes it tough for him to choose between trusting Paola to start a new life with him and quitting law to write a psychological novel. A novel inspired by the conflicting accounts he has been given.
Emotion prevails over reason and common sense, in the years of the Nazi occupation of Italy as well as in our own day. Stefano Manca, a writer and a soldier; Brando Malaspina, a British historian of Italian origin: two lives so far away from each other and so yet similar as to the individual choices that have a tragic bearing upon them. This is the theme of a love-and-war novel that in the time span of a cigarette’s smoke shows itself to be a story of human contradictions. A story, narrated from two separate points of view, where in 1944 the lust for Febe, the intellectual wife of an officer of Mussolini’s army, and in 2005 the lust for Buba, the cosmopolitan Milanese who cannot free herself from a relationship rooted in sympathy and compassion, make the protagonists incapable of coping with the challenges of reality.
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