CASA ROSSA
By Francesca Marciano.

Pantheon Books, Publisher of CASA ROSSA states that in her first novel, 
"Rules of the Wild", Francesca Marciano gave us a sensuous, insider's 
portrait of the white expatriate community in Kenya, and an Africa both 
irresistibly beautiful and torn by conflict.  The reviews were many and 
unanimous: "Intensely romantic … worthy of Flaubert" (The New York Times); 
"Marciano writes with consuming, abiding passion" (Chicago Tribune); "The 
most memorable character in this breathtaking first novel is not person, but 
a place" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Now with the same passion and fervor, she gives us a similarly intimate view 
of a country tried and torn-but this time, it is her own.  The beauty, 
confusion, and glamour of 60 years of Italy's history is translated through 
the story of one remarkable family in Francesca Marciano's second novel, CASA 
ROSSA (Pantheon Books/$25/September 3, 2002).  This is a fresh, contemporary 
perspective, and Italy we have not quite seen before.

CASA ROSSA is the enthralling story of three generations of 20th-century 
Italian women set around a red stone farmhouse in Puglia in Southern Italy. 
Romantic scandal between an artist and his muse during World War II; the 
glamour of "La Dolce Vita" 1950s Rome; the political instability and 
terrorism of Italy in the 1970s; the New York City art world of the 
1980s-Marciano brings the Strada family women, their loves and their lives, 
brilliantly, hauntingly, into being.

A suspenseful and emotionally intense story of what happens when family 
secrets collide with history, CONTACT ROSA confirms Francesca Marciano as a 
writer of significant talent.
 
In an interview with Francesca Marciano, she was asked: 
What made you want to write about Italy this time? 

"I felt the urge to plunge into some early memories, some close feelings. 
Although CASA ROSSA is a work of fiction, so much of the complex tapestry of 
my background as an Italian is woven into it.

There are, I think, certain images that follow us all of our lives; they are 
as powerful as if they are engraved in our DNA, and are responsible for 
shaping our lives.

In this novel I wanted, among other things, to conjure up these images of 
mine, and try to make them come to life on the page.  They come from the 
landscape of Southern Italy- cacti; relentless cicada song among the olive 
trees; crumbling farm houses and their thick walls, the sweet smell of ripe 
figs: these are the sounds, sights, and smells of the place I fell in love 
with as a child.

For me Southern Italy is a place with incredible power, as I set out to write 
CASA ROSSA, I thought it would serve well as background for the characters of 
a novel.  I wanted the people who inhabit this novel to mirror the quality of 
the landscape: it's beauty and power, its starkness--- a feral quality.  It's 
a land beset by poverty; to live here, one would have to have a will to 
survive everything.

What you imagine "Italy" evokes for Americans?

Italy probably still evokes, as it did for EM Forster, Edith Wharton, and 
Hemingway, a notion of otherness.  There's a sense of freedom, of 
exhilaration, whenever an American comes to Italy and realizes the place, as 
lovely as it is, is still so "unstructured". The image of Italy, of it's 
rawness, evokes a longed for vulnerability that makes one feel more alive.
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Those Italian American Organizations wishing to invite the author as a 
speaker to one of your meetings, or to determine when the author will be 
available in your town for book signings, you may contact Kimberly Burns, 
Associate Director of Publicity, Pantheon Books at (212) 572-2685, or at << 
kburns@randomhouse.com >>