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Bologna, Italy, 1944, and the streets are crawling with German soldiers. Nineteen-year-old Leila Venturi is shocked into joining the Resistance after her beloved best friend Rebecca, the daughter of a prominent Jewish businessman, is ruthlessly deported to a concentration camp.
In February 1981, exchange student Rhiannon Hughes arrives in Bologna to study at the university. There, she rents a room from Leila, who is now middle-aged and infirm. Leila’s nephew, Gianluca, offers to show Rhiannon around but Leila warns her off him.
Soon Rhiannon finds herself being drawn into a web of intrigue. What is Gianluca’s interest in a far-right group? And how is the nefarious head of this group connected to Leila? As dark secrets emerge from the past, Rhiannon is faced with a terrible choice. Will she take her courage into both hands and risk everything?
An evocative, compelling read, “The Girl from Bologna” is a story of love lost, daring exploits, and heart wrenching redemption.
In 1944, Bologna is becoming increasingly unsafe to remain in. German soldiers walk the streets, and bombs are regularly dropped, killing hundreds of innocents. Leila Venturi remains in the city with her brother when their parents leave to stay somewhere safer. The city is her home, where her brother, best friend, Rebecca, and sweetheart, Paolo, live.
But Rebecca is a Jew, and while she has taken every precaution to pretend that she is not, her family is deported, and all that Leila knows is that she has been taken to a concentration camp. With her best friend’s life in danger, Leila cannot simply sit around and wait for the Allies to take Bologna from the Germans – she must step in and help the process. There is a group of gappisti that Paolo has joined, and Leila makes her desire to join them very clear.
In 1981, Leila takes in an exchange student, Rhiannon, in a bid to not feel as alone in an empty house. While Rhiannon is staying, Leila decides that she should make an account of what she lived through during the war, for there was recently a terrorist attack on a Bologna station and has brought the memories back into her mind. But, as she records the events she experienced, the past seems to be coming back in more ways than one. Rhiannon and Leila’s nephew, Gianluca, find themselves in the middle of things they can’t quite understand, and somehow, it all connects into the things Leila is recording.
This book has an entirely different approach to the dual-timeline aspect than previous books I have read by this author. Instead of different chapters for the past and the present, although the present is still at least 40 years ago, we only see the past through Leila’s recordings. She dictates her story to a recorder, which is when we find out about her past. Most of the story is actually set in the 1980s, although, as always, the past is never gone, and things Leila has seen in her life are prevalent to everything that Rhiannon and Gianluca are experiencing.
I loved Leila, she is an absolutely lovely person. The effort she goes to, to make sure Rhiannon is comfortable, shows how much she cares. She spends hours preparing wonderful meals, to introduce Rhiannon to Italian culture, and answers all of her questions and more. Rhiannon is also a character I absolutely adored. She came to Italy to better her speaking abilities in Italian, but she finds so much more than practice in Leila’s house. Leila and Rhiannon become like family in the few weeks they are together, and knowing each other certainly changes the paths their lives take.
By showing the past through Leila’s recordings, you might assume there wouldn’t be much of a connection to the past, with a lack of details of the events, and emotions lost in the format. This is not the case. Instead, the emotions are shown through Leila, for even nearly forty years on, she still feels what she felt then. She still feels the love for Paolo, and still grieves for those she lost. It is almost more emotional because the emotions were so strong at the time, they are still present in Leila’s life, and still affecting her.
I can’t talk about everything that happens with Rhiannon too much, because I don’t want to give away the plot. She meets another exchange student, although Marie is from France, not Wales like herself. While it seems logical that Marie and Rhiannon would become good friends, as they’re both strangers to Italy, and learning together, Rhiannon can’t help but feel wary towards Marie. There is something off about her, and the more Rhiannon learns, the more questions she faces. There is a mystery, and it is shocking to read it unfold, for you only learn the truth near the very end of the book, so you are kept guessing within minimal solid information for a while.
With the mix of culture, history, and mystery, this is a book that has a bit of everything, and has combined them all perfectly. Once again, Siobhan Daiko does not disappoint. I have read all the books (so far) in the ‘Girls from the Italian Resistance: Heart-breaking page-turners, based on actual events in Italy during World War 2’ series, and I have loved every single one of them. I look forward to seeing what else this author writes!
Siobhan Daiko is a British historical fiction author. A lover of all things Italian, she lives in the Veneto region of northern Italy with her husband, a Havanese dog and a rescued cat. After a life of romance and adventure in Hong Kong, Australia and the UK, Siobhan now spends her time indulging her love of writing and enjoying her life near Venice.
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Thank you so much for the lovely review!!!
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