David Downie, Author
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Après-Midi is welcoming legacy newshound-author author David Downie, along with renowned author Harriet Welty Rochefort for a lively, entertaining and provocative conversation about David’s new book, Shadows of Rome: A Memoir of War and Love from Italy to California. It’s poignant, unexpected, and un-put-down-able.
Anyone who has read David or Harriet’s books, or attended one of their past events—both veterans at these gatherings—know they’re outspoken and opinionated and are irrepressible storytellers. David has said that he didn’t set out to write a timely, topical book with political themes. But with the return to the Oval Office of Donald Trump, Shadows of Rome feels like it’s about more than Italy and California decades ago. His colorful family’s wild experiences under Mussolini and during World War Two, and then in the hippy-druggie days of San Francisco and Berkeley, feel eerily contemporary. David’s mother and grandfather were in the Italian Resistance. His father fought in the Italian Campaign….
Harriet’s latest book—Final Transgression, a novel set primarily during World War II, in France, and based loosely on her husband’s family—gives a very different take on the Resistance, from the French perspective. It’s a gripping tale with unexpected and tragic outcomes.
David is a regular guest and this time at Café de la Mairie he will be talking about his memoir, Shadows of Rome: Love and War from Italy to California, the saga of his parents’ wartime romance, his antifascist freemason grandfather who tried to assassinate Mussolini, and other high-color characters on the Italian side of his family.
David’s mother, Romana Laura Anzi, was an extravagant neo-baroque artist and outspoken proto-feminist born in Rome to a wealthy, distinguished family. She survived Mussolini and the Nazis, risked her life carrying messages for the Italian Resistance, and wound up marrying a wisecracking bespectacled GI journalist who fought in the Italian Campaign then stayed on in Rome to woo her. The GI—Charles E. Downie, Jr.—was David’s father.
Ranging from the Dolomites in World War One to Rome in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, then to San Francisco and Berkeley in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Shadows of Rome tells the bittersweet tale of this unlikely mid-20th-century Italian-American couple and their unusual offspring. With wry humor and philosophical detachment, in the pages of this moving memoir, David relives his own roller-coaster youth in California and Italy.
Reading like a novel, Shadows of Rome is a quest by the author to unpack his mercurial mother’s multiple secrets, and those of his larger-than-life grandfather, an antifascist lawyer tortured and ruined by Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts.
Without trying to be, Shadows of Rome is disconcertingly topical in Trump’s America.
David is a native San Franciscan who moved to Paris in the mid-1980s. He divides his time between France and Italy. A longtime journalist, his travel, food and arts features have appeared in over 50 print magazines and newspapers worldwide and on dozens of websites.
David is the award-winning author of six novels and over a dozen acclaimed nonfiction books translated into a variety of foreign languages, including French, Italian, Chinese and Korean. His essays have been published in over a dozen anthologies. Downie graduated from UC Berkeley and Brown University. He is married to photographer Alison Harris.
Harriet Welty Rochefort is an author, speaker, freelance journalist, former professor of journalism at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and longtime resident of France. She has written three light-hearted, informative books on the French and their ways—French Toast, French Fried, and Joie de Vivre, all published by St. Martin’s Press. Her latest book, Final Transgression, published in 2020, is a historical novel that takes place in Paris and southwest France during World War II which has garnered high praise from eminent U.S. historian Robert Paxton, among others.
A French-American dual citizen, Harriet lives with husband Philippe in the trendy east of Paris in a garden apartment with a tiny lawn just big enough to mow and a fig tree that has miraculously defied both Paris weather and pollution. She opened by telling her story, starting with her Iowan roots and how she met Philippe at Le Select, a popular café in the Montparnasse district. Keeping on topic, she presented a PowerPoint presentation describing what France was like during the German occupation—a fascinating history the French hope never to repeat.
This particular story is about a French woman in Périgourd, who just wants to have a normal life amidst the chaos of war— gets caught up in the battle to her demise in spite of her efforts to stay neutral. It’s not a tale you come across often, but it’s based on a true story as part of Harriet’s husband, Philippe’s, family history. You’ll find it fascinating—a real page-turner.
Praise for other books by David Downie:
“Zesty and entertaining.”—Kirkus
“Delightful and thoroughly researched.”—Publishers Weekly
“Beautifully written and refreshingly original.”—The SF Chronicle
“Delightful and insightful.”—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Chicago Tribune
“Unequaled poignancy and passion.”—National Geographic Traveler
“Expertly captures the powerlessness and courage of those in peril.”—Booklist
“Compelling… a rapturous, history-rich love poem.”—The Toronto Star
“Fabulous company!”—NPR
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