On Wednesday, 26 November two books, Alhambra and My Pizza and Toffee Apples in the 1950s will be launched at the Italian Cultural Institute at 6.30pm. 

Above is an old black and white photo from the 1950s. There I am, plumb and clumsy with my blond mother, Anna, my little cousin and my aunt Lillina. We were on our way back home from a great day at the beach during our splendid summer holidays in Taranto, Italy.

My mother is no longer with us but quite co-incidentally my aunt, Lillina (Angela Mastronuzzi) and I have both written the memoirs of our family with Anna, my mother and Lillina's elder sister, as the central figure.

We will present our two books together because, although one is written in Italian and the other in English, one is the sequel of the other. Alhambra by Angela Mastronuzzi, tells of the tragedy, the hopes, the disillusion of a southern Italian middle class family during the 20 years of the Fascist Regime and during the nightmarish years of the war. My Pizza and Toffee Apples in the 1950s, which I wrote in English, is the sequel and takes off just where the other book ends, at the wedding of Anna with Bertie, Capt. Salomone, "a young Englishman who had made her his bride". It takes us through the decade of the 1950s, a time of great change, of historical moments which affected people's lives and were to change the world, as we knew it, forever.