Angela Mastronuzzi

Alhambra

Scorpione Editrice

2013

295pp

Some time ago, I had reviewed a book, My Pizza & Toffee Apples in the 1950s by Pat Salomone.

It tells the story of a Maltese family living in Tigne in the 1950s as told by a daughter.

This book is, if we can use the term, the prequel to this book. For Pat Salomone's mother was Italian, Anna, who married in post-war Taranto an officer of the British army, Captain Bertie Salomone.

The book being reviewed tells the story of Anna's family from the mid-1920s in Taranto.

The title, Alhambra, is the name of a theatre in central Taranto, very near to the family home. It was pulled down quite early in the book to make way for yet another Fascist-era building.

Anna is Angela Mastronuzzi's sister, the older sister who is more inclined to music while Angela is more inclined to writing.

The family is a rather normal family with a father who was a doctor, so, let's say, an upper middle class family. It was definitely and fiercely Fascist in leaning, perhaps understandably after an uncle, Minguccio, was killed in a brawl with some Communists and he was quickly declared a Fascist martyr.

Angela's book tells of a childhood spent in Taranto, with tales of school and basically of growing up.

Until the war, which did not feature much in the children's lives till then, suddenly materialized and the family had to seek refuge in Martina Franca, since Taranto was the base of the Italian navy and heavily bombarded. In fact, the children and their family were caught out in Taranto in a lull of the fighting but survived and escaped to Martina Franca.

The war disrupted life, especially the lives of children still of school age. Worse was to come with the invasion of Italy when the country found it had been cut in two and the Germans from allies became enemies.

For Anna, the end of the war and the impossibility to communicate let alone travel between north and south, also meant a high cost in personal terms for her airman boyfriend, Franco, who found himself sent to the northernmost corner of Italy and the relationship, so far moving well, foundered.

It was on the ruins of this relationship that another, a stranger one, was born. It all started with a Christmas dinner and a last minute invitation to invite a forlorn, homesick, British officer. That was Captain Albert Salomone, a Maltese, who came, who saw and who conquered.

And so the book tells the tale of how a Fascist family came to have a daughter marry an officer of the conquering forces.

The rest of the story is told in the other book, how the family settled in Malta and the child's memories of growing up in the 1950s Malta.

The book by Angela Mastronuzzi is remarkable for the details the author remembers from her childhood, down to the songs, the fashion and the fashion magazines of those times.

Noel Grima