When it comes to women‘s nonfiction
about Italy, the major player is Frances Mayes, of course. Her account of the
heroic efforts that she and her husband put into renovating a villa near
Cortona, Under the Tuscan Sun, got
well-deserved rave reviews, and was made into a pretty good movie. The other
two books in what became a trilogy are Bella
Tuscany and Every Day in Tuscany.
In a similar vein, Sally Gable’s Palladian Days describes the experience of buying, moving into, and renovating one of the great buildings of the Western world, the Villa Cornaro near Venice.
In both books the women are enchanted by the usual suspects in Italy: the people, the food, the art. However, Mayes and Gable write about them with the delight of Americans who have found what Henry James called The Great Good Place. As they learn Italian and settle in, they experience some of the darker sides of Italian society, but basically their books are sunny as Florence in June.
Not surprisingly, women who write
detective fiction set in Italy concentrate on the darker sides of Italian life.
One of the best of these is April Smith’s White
Shotgun, her fourth book about FBI Special Agent Ana Grey. Although Smith
sets the novel in Siena in the summer, the sun is soon clouded over by the twin
shadows of drugs and violence. White
Shotgun is one of the best adventure/thriller/detective novels of recent
years, and I can only repeat what Robert Crais said about Smith: “One of the
finest, smartest, most gifted writers working in crime fiction today.”
The unquestioned queen of detective
fiction set in Italy is Donna Leon, who has just 
published Drawing Conclusions, her twentieth novel about Venetian police
commissioner Guido Brunetti. She is such a formidable crime fiction writer that
she deserves a separate blog, but for the moment it must be enough to make some
general comments.
Unlike Ana Gray, Leon’s much-loved hero was born in Venice, and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Since Brunetti is a happily married man with two charming children, Leon admits a good deal of sunshine into his life. But that sunshine is more than offset by the deep shadows of the social problems that he encounters. Although it would do a disservice to so fine a writer as Leon to say that she preaches, but she does use her fiction to address some of the issues that plague contemporary Italy such as corruption, pollution, and the persecution of minorities such as homosexuals and gypsies. I know of no other crime writer who can show a passionate concern for social justice while writing superb popular fiction.
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