The Lost Daughter is the second novel I’ve written in a planned trilogy dealing with key moments in Italian politics in the twentieth century. In fact, the last three novels I’ve written, The Faces of Angels, Villa Triste, and The Lost Daughter, have all been set in Italy, though I myself had barely set foot in the country before I’d turned forty. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up pretty much half and half between the USA and the UK, where we moved for my father’s work the first time before I was six months old and later owned a house for thirty-five years. My first encounter with Italy was a two-week vacation of the pretty standard broke-university-student type when I was in my early twenties; the second was a slightly more upmarket vacation in Florence and Venice with my mother that lasted only a week.
So it’s not unreasonable to wonder, Why Italy? rather than England? Or America? Or for that matter, France? I’ve asked the question of myself, not least because the what and where any writer chooses to write about is both defining and revealing—to ourselves as much as anyone else. One of the weird alchemies of writing is that we don’t always know what we’re doing until we’ve done it. And sometimes not even then.
To begin to explain, I need to give a little bit of a background. In 2000, my British husband and I bought a group of derelict seventeenth-century barns on the northern edge of Dartmoor in the west of England and embarked on what would become a decade-long building and renovation project. That is how we came to be living in the west of England when the Twin Towers fell on the morning of September 11, 2001.
We spent that day, like most of the rest of the world, glued to the television and on the phone, anxiously tracking down family and friends. It wasn’t until dinner that we slowed down enough to ask each other “what this all meant” and, I suspect like many people around the world, “what would happen next.”
Over a glass of wine, my husband and I found ourselves asking each other what we would choose to do if the world were going to fly to pieces. I never went to continental Europe as a kid, despite the fact that I had spent every summer and school holiday in England. So it was I who said, “I want to go to the Uffizi. If World War III is going the break out, let’s go to Florence.” And so we did.
What I remember from that trip is the cold, blowing down from the Apennines, flecking the Arno into whitecaps, and the way the streets, narrow enough to be shadowed at the best of times, turned dark by five, and how the shops spilled light out onto the glassy cobbles. I remember a few warm days, but mostly rain, running down the grim, rusticated faces of the buildings with their gigantic torch rings and doors so huge smaller doors had to be set into them, as if this were a city once inhabited by giants. I remember the crowds on the Ponte Vecchio just before dark, braving the winds to feed the fish who come there at sunset, carrying in the shadows of their fish memory the centuries before when the bridge was the province of butchers who at sunset drew their shutters and threw their spoiling offal and carcasses and hooves into the sludgy water. I remember facing the Primavera and thinking it one of the most sinister paintings I had ever seen, stained as it is with Botticelli’s madness that seeps like mold up through the beauty. And I vividly remember standing in a darkened room staring at Bronzino’s Lucrezia Tuornabuoni—first because she had the same name as me, and also because Bronzino gave me the eerie feeling that I had never really seen portraits before.
How do we first begin to love a person, or a place, or an idea? I don’t know, but I think that it has far less to do with beauty or even appearance than we are led to believe. Because, I should confess now, I do not find Florence—or even most of Italy—particularly beautiful. Of course there are certain views, vistas, buildings, Tuscan valleys, and cliffs falling into azure seas that are undeniably lovely. The food is good, but, like everywhere else, can sometimes be awful or just mundane. The wine is nice, but for me, France takes that biscuit every time. None of that is what I found beguiling on that trip, or have found beguiling ever since. To me, Italy is compelling simply because it is one of the most intellectually rich, vibrant, and contradictory countries in the world—and from that first visit I knew both that I wanted to try to understand something of it, and that I probably never would.
In the spring of 2002, I returned to Florence alone, rented an apartment for three months, and walked. Accompanied by the tingly awareness that being alone and lonely in a strange city brings, I prowled. And poked. And stared. And, yes, I shopped. I don’t know exactly what I had learned by the time my husband joined me at the end of May, but I was undoubtedly better dressed than I had been—although I had a pretty weird haircut—and I had finished my first novel set in Italy, The Faces of Angels.
We were lucky in where we lived in England. Not only because it was beautiful, isolated, and usually rather boring—no bad thing if you’re trying to be a writer—but also because it was close to a regional airport that EasyJet began to fly in and out of shortly after we arrived. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we could be in Milan faster than we could be in London, and that—if we were willing to fly at ungodly hours on odd days of the week at either very short or very long notice—we could do so for approximately the same cost as the train.
And so, for the next nine years, we went to Italy at every opportunity. We went for weekends and weeks and months. We went north and south and even east. We drove and took trains and occasionally flew or took boats, and did not walk as much as either of us now wish we had. We found favorite places, and places we thought were wonderful and then “went off” of, and places we hated at first and then liked better, and a very few places we did not like at all. And when we wanted to go somewhere that felt like home, in the sense that we knew how it would smell and feel and sound, when we wanted a favorite walk, or when we wanted to be surprised yet again at what had been achieved on a relatively small patch of ground by a very small handful of humanity, we went back to Florence.
For all that we found familiar—the same greengrocer, the taxi route from the airport, the place I like where you can get a dish of chicken liver and sage, the dark creepy shadows of the fish—I do not think that there was ever a time when Florence failed to surprise us or remind us of what we did not know or understand. No company will ever bottle that, although I daresay every perfume house has tried—the delight, disappointment, familiarity, and contradiction; the endless refracted strangeness that fills a familiar container we have come to love.
It was on one of these trips, somewhere down the line of years, that I noticed for the first time the plaques on walls. I bumped into one in Florence. Then, once I started looking, I saw memorials to the Partisans in towns of every size everywhere, and I began to understand how little I understood about Italy’s experience in World War II. My second novel set in Italy, Villa Triste, came directly from my effort to comprehend, both in political and human terms, not only what had happened during the War, but how it had happened.
In terms of Italian history, we all know about the Romans: Julius Caesar and gladiators and horrid stinky vats of oil and fish paste that are periodically pulled off the ocean floor and found to be still edible today. And about the Renaissance: the Medici and Humanism and The Decameron and Michelangelo’s David and Da Vinci’s flying machine. After that it kind of dribbles off into one long bleach of Tuscan sun, with spurts of Shelly and Byron and odd goings-on in Venice. Merchant–Ivory films and Vespas. All of which are fine, as far as they go. But like all lovers, I wanted more. And more. Every niggling little bit of history. Which was how I ended up at the Red Brigades.
My family lived in England during the IRA years. I remember photograph after photograph of when the secretary of state for Northern Ireland’s car exploded as he was leaving the House of Commons. And the December bombing outside Harrods, where we always had a family day of Christmas shopping. I remember that the horse the IRA did not kill with a nail bomb in Hyde Park was called Sefton. From farther afield I remember news footage of Black September and the Baader-Meinhof Group. But I do not remember the Red Brigades. And I do not recall one moment of the Aldo Moro kidnapping, which, through the series of letters published in newspapers, became nothing less than an extraordinary public dialogue over how terrorists and terrorism should be treated. So, when I came across this most human drama—something that could be playing out today in Syria or Somalia or Afghanistan and raises many of the same questions—I found that Italy had surprised me yet again, and I wanted to know everything I could.
The Moro kidnapping itself proved surprisingly easy to outline in detail. The newspapers were a primary source, followed by the trial transcripts of the Red Brigade members involved in the kidnapping. We know a great deal about how he was taken, how the private messages and tapes and letters were passed to the family, and about the apartment where he was held. All the details down to the giant wicker basket used to transport his body to and from the garage, the furnishings of his room, and that sand from the beach at Ostia found in the blanket he was wrapped in after his death, which for a while led to the erroneous belief that he had been killed there. Eventually, these facts fit together into a mosaic. Filling the mosaics, gaps—some wider than others—in as plausible and emotionally convincing way as possible is the special province of the historical novel.
As with Villa Triste, I now had a factual framework. The challenge, again, was to stick to it faithfully. Everything about the Red Brigades in The Lost Daughter, where and how Mara Cagol was shot and even the rumors concerning her second autopsy, for instance, are true. I felt strongly that I would find the novel, yet again, in the gaps—the spaces between that can be filled only with “how it might have happened.” And, of course, why.
We packed up and went to Ferrara. I chose the city because the Red Brigades were largely a product of the affluent north and in particular of the University at Padua, which has a tradition of radicalism going back four or five centuries and is, relatively speaking, Just Up The Road A Piece. Ferrara was not only close by but smaller and quieter, less a hotbed, which was what I was looking for.
In January the city was freezing and beautiful and haunted by the ghosts of the Finzi-Continis, who never actually had a garden there. Antonio is a composite figure. The farmland in the Po delta is as described, and the factory explosion did happen. Many people were killed, but the brothers, although likely, are a product of my imagination. The character of Angela is based on a real person. One I knew existed, in that apartment in Rome. But that was all. The rest—the woman herself, her life, where she came from, what happened and did not happen to her and the hows and whys of her heart—was a gap.
From the start, I was fascinated by three questions. The first was: How do you come to be an intelligent, well-educated, middle-class, twentysomething native Italian—this is the typical profile of Red Brigade members—in an apartment in the middle of Rome, holding the nation’s most famous politician captive? The second was: Once you’re there, what do you do? And the third was: If you have been a part of a kidnapping that ends with ten bullets, do you ever stop being a part of that? Do you ever really have “another life”?
In order to write The Lost Daughter successfully, to make that convincing case, I needed to know everything I could about the Red Brigades. Not just factually, which was comparatively easy, a matter of public record. But viscerally and emotionally. I needed to understand who they were in their heads, why they did what they did.
That the Red Brigades were more professional than the Baader-Meinhofs, and, even arguably, the Provisional IRA, that they posed more of a danger to the stability of the state than either of those groups said something about them, about their discipline, dedication, and control. In order for Angela to be a viable character in the novel, it had to be possible that her “official version” of what she knew and when she knew it could be true (whether it is or not is up to the reader to decide). To that end, I had to understand how the Red Brigades worked—how they became so disciplined and how the “cells” were set up, the system that dictated and controlled who knew what and when. I put a great deal of time and energy into this, and I became utterly convinced that the possibility of lovers and spouses and best friends being on the most intimate terms, sometimes for years, with best friends and lovers and spouses whom they had no idea were active, long-term members of Brigate Rosse was not only possible, but happened. This was precisely what made them so dangerous.