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Graceful, intelligent, brave, but far from saintly, the brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer Iris Origo was one of the most intriguing and attractive women of the twentieth century. Her father, a rich and gentle American dying young of consumption, might have been drawn by Henry James. Her mother was a child of the Irish Ascendency, and the Kilkenny house Iris knew as a child was burned in the Troubles. Settling at the Villa Medici at Fiesole after her father's death, she and her mother became part of the Anglo-Florentine world, a hotbed of gossip and literary rivalries that included the Berensons, Harold Acton, Jent Ross and Edith Wharton. Her marriage to the shrewd landowner Antonio Origo was a surprise, though, but together they bought and brought to life a derelict, arid stretch of land in the Val d'Orcia called La Foce and created a model estate. Within this compelling biography, Caroline Moorehead throws new light on the growth of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s and '30s and the effect it had on the Origos. They took great risks in helping partisans and, later, prisoners-of-war.

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9781567922714

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