The Fall of Rome: An American Family 1945-1995

This is the story of a family - their extraordinary journey towards the American Dream, and their losses along the way. There is also a parallel story running throughout, which is the story of a daughter and her father, and the relationship which exists between fathers and daughters everywhere - a mixture of love, fear, embarrassment, dependence.
The story begins with a photograph, circa 1945, of a mother, a father, two girls and a blond baby - a happy family picknicking in a field. Her own family, many years before her birth, but strangers to her. This is my family. I know nothing about them, or the details of the picture. There is no information on the back, no details to prove who these people are and how they lived.' In this book, Janine di Giovanni explores this family's history, going back to the time her father fled Italy for New York, to his death sixty years later. Her father had abandoned his nationality but never his sense of belonging somewhere else. It was this strange feeling of displacement that he passed on to his children and which his daughter was to reassess in the maelstrom of emotions released upon her by his sudden loss.