Blog Tour: The Italian Wife by Kate Furnivall

Title: The Italian Wife
Author: Kate Furnivall 
Published: 7th May 2015
Publisher: Sphere

Today I am delighted to host my spot on the Blog Tour for Kate Furnivall's The Italian Wife. I have a guespost to share with you talking about Revenge as a theme in the story. Hope you like it! All the other brilliant stops on the tour are listed below, so please do stop by their blogs for some great content.

Guestpost

Revenge as a theme in the Italian Wife

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

That’s what they say, isn’t it? But in THE ITALIAN WIFE it is a potage served so scalding hot, it would strip the enamel off your teeth.

Italy is a country where emotions seem to come in only two temperatures – hot or hotter. They don’t do lukewarm. And certainly their anger is never ‘cold’ or ‘icy’. It’s one of the reasons I love Italy so much. They know how to express emotion – love, anger, grief, joy, despair – with a passion that makes life more intense and desirable.

So when things go seriously wrong in THE ITALIAN WIFE, you just know that life in Bellina is going to get a whole lot more interesting. We call it revenge, but the Italians have their own special word for it – vendetta. A scary word. It has a powerful meaning and a serious significance that can never fade, never die, until the required last drop of blood is exacted, even if it takes generations to do so. It is the duty of a son to avenge a slight to his father, whether it takes a year – or ten years or even fifty years later. The vendetta must be fulfilled.

The story of THE ITALIAN WIFE takes place in 1932, a turbulent era in Italy’s history. There are two people who have cause to seek vengeance for a past wrong. Isabella Berotti is one. She is an ambitious architect on the new town being constructed and ten years earlier her husband, Luigi Berotti, was shot dead in broad daylight in a bustling Italian marketplace when Isabella was pregnant with his child, laughing happily at the exact moment the trigger was pulled.

It was a time when Mussolini ruled the country with the full force of Fascism and he employed men such as Luigi Berotti as part of his militia army of Blackshirts to do his brutal bidding. Ten years later, what seems like a chance occurrence – a woman asks Isabella to watch over her child for a moment – changes the course of Isabella’s life and she sets off on a path to find her husband’s killer. She is eager to help the abandoned child, Rosa, but at the same time she needs to unlock the information that she knows is in the child’s head. It is a fine emotional line that Isabella walks.

The second person who seeks vengeance for a past wrong is Carlo Olivera, a freedom fighter who rebels against Mussolini’s police state and the suffering that it brought to his family. He has complex personal reasons for his vendetta and when his path crosses with Isabella’s, they are caught in a maze of tangled motives.

But Italians know how to love even more intensely than they know how to hate. Neither Isabella nor Olivera are prepared for how love can weave itself around the threads of vengeance, changing the fabric of the emotion. Olivera risks not only his life, but everything he believes in, for his daughter, Rosa, while Isabella’s love for Roberto Falco, the town’s subversive photographer, leads her, step by step, closer to the truth that she needs to find.

If she is ever to let the vendetta go – let’s say it bluntly: the requirement is blood for blood – and if she is no longer going to be afraid to look at herself in the mirror, then she has to release herself from the promise of revenge that she has made. It is love that enables her to catch a glimpse of happiness in a future that will be served not cold, but warm and passionate – the way only Italians know how.