Foreword to The Etruscan Princess by Bernadette Luciano
Astute California detective Nick Fusco joins his fiancée Valentina, a professor who specializes in film noir, for a long-awaited trip to Italy. But the mysterious disappearance of Valentina’s colleague and roommate transforms the dream vacation into a perilous journey. Maria Marotti guides the reader on an intimate and sensual voyage that crisscrosses the Italian peninsula, from urban Rome with its piazze and landmarks, its surrounding quaint villages, Etruscan ruins, and lakeside castles, to a bustling Naples and its sinister underbelly, to Venice’s artisanal islands, and to the picturesque towns of the Cinque Terre. Detailed descriptions balance the fast-paced unfolding of harrowing events, and allow us to indulge with Nick and Valentina in the richness and diversity of Italian life, offering up sumptuous meals of pasta all’amatriciana and parmigiana di melanzane, serene vistas across Lago Bracciano and the glimmering Mediterranean, and the excavated treasures of Pompeii. Marotti’s traveling narrative weaves seamlessly backwards and forward in time, heightening the drama while filling gaps in the lives of its unsettled characters and their tangled relationships. As we are dragged deeper and deeper into the case, we discover dark secrets and troubled pasts through the small-time kidnapping hijacked by the Camorra and the cold and calculated world of international art theft. This is armchair travel at its best: satisfying the appetites of both the uninitiated to Italy and the veteran Italophile. Informed by Marotti’s nuanced and wide-ranging knowledge of Italian culture and peppered with her experience in the quirky halls of academia, the novel is perhaps most memorable for its transmission of a profound understanding of the fragility and generosity of the human spirit.
Professor Bernadette Luciano
Head, School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics
Associate Dean (International)
Faculty of Arts
University of Auckland