Bookouture The Italian Villa

Reading this book in this moment of my life has been special. I felt very connected to the characters as though they were real. What a magnificent story, I enjoyed my days reading it and it was reflected in my own life. Inspiring for me as a young woman who is still figuring her life out. Lots of lessons to be taken away from the book. Thank you for this gem I will have with me forever.

Easy quick read

This book captured and swept me away! It grabbed my attention and drew me in like no book has ever done. The stories were intense and passionate of families and their bonds.It was a great story of the war and how it can impact people - families of different generations.Even though I too was adopted but born of German heritage, the ache and longing to know of a family and past was brought to the surface through this book.Daniela was able to capture the true emotion of a child/ adult without a birth family and how it feels. The yearning and the desire to be from someone, a family, that may or may not know about their existence and just might want to find and connect.I could go on and on with all the emotions. But… I must Thank Daniela, for bringing the thoughts to paper in such an amazing and passionately well written novel!

This book was an easy read, but very predictable.

I’m a big fan of historical fiction set in the WWII era. And I love the Italian countryside. So I figured The Italian Villa would be a good fit for my reading taste. We first meet Callie, a waitress in a Texas diner, one her twenty-first birthday. It is a milestone day for her even though she has been on her own for the past couple of years. With her parents having died in a fire when she was a young girl, Callie has been shifted between various foster homes. But now she has her own apartment and a job; she’s working extra shifts to save for college although she has no idea yet of what she wants to study. But her whole life is about to change when she learns that she has an inheritance – a villa in Italy left to her by her real mother. Callie reels from the news that not only is she a property owner but that her parents were really her adoptive parents. She is given a box that contained several items, one of which is the war-time diary of a young woman named Elisa Stella.With trepidation, Callie sets off for the mountainous region of north western Italy and the village of Montevino. A picture-perfect village nestled in the foothills of the Alps, north of Turin and south of Geneva, has played a large part in Callie’s heritage. But the people there aren’t quite as open to accepting her as she might have hoped. Nonna Tina, a local innkeeper of a certain age, sees something in Callie and by bits and pieces helps the young woman to piece together her lineage. Meantime, Callie takes up residence in the villa (Casa de Lucciole) which is on the grounds of an actual castle. There she meets the groundskeeper, Tomasso. There first meeting is the stuff that stories are told about – a violent rain storm, a treacherous drive up a mountain, getting drench and taking shelter at his place, and a marvelous dog named Morella.The story of finding who all these people really are (exactly who is Flora, the woman who maintains the villa?) is interspersed with entries from the old diary that seem to parallel Callie’s adventure. She decides to remain in Montevino for a while longer to discover what happened to her mother and learn who was her father.As another review has said, ‘it is a story of love, loss, and secrets’. I thoroughly enjoyed the rich details of the village, castle, and the villa itself; enough to make me want to live in Montevino. The plot is very emotional. The diary entries of Elisa show the reader how insidiously the villagers, even Elisa’s younger brother, were duped into accepting Fascism. As historical fiction it works very well. But the contemporary side of the story left me wanting. The character of Callie seemed disjointed. Sure she had been thrown a loop, but she seemed to accept things as they came. I was happy that in the end she found the family she’d been searching for her entire life.As historical fiction, this is a short book – only 268 pages. There could have been so much more added here about the war years and their long-range impact on the current village and its citizens. Several minor grammatical errors contributed to the lower rating.