A Castle in Romagna
Igor Stiks
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Autumn Hill Books
ISBN: 0975444409

A young refugee explores an Italian Renaissance castle.

Alternating between Renaissance Italy & Yugoslavia during the time of Tito, A Castle in Romagna tells two tales of love, intrigue, & betrayal.

It is the summer of 1995, the war in Bosnia is raging, & a young Bosnian is taking a tour of an Italian Renaissance castle, & is caught up in the two tales of passion & intrigue that his Franciscan guide, a refugee like himself, relates.

In one story Enzo Strecci, a Renaissance poet from Lombardy, has the ill fortune of falling in love with the wife of Francesco Mardi, his host & protector during a time of Hapsburg incursions & espionage.

The other, more modern story, is the Franciscan guide's own ill-fated passion for the local Communist police commander's daughter during Tito's rupture with Stalinism.

Between Rimini, Italy, in 1535 & the Croatian island of Rab in 1948, lives & fates become intertwined, history repeats itself, & nostalgia for home becomes bittersweet.

I highly recommend A Castle in Romagna because it's exquisitely written, intense like shadows on a sunny day, atmospheric as the bouquet of herbs when you lift the lid on a pot of spaghetti sauce, & passionate without sentimentality. Igor Sticks & his translators, Tomislav Kuzmanovic & Russell Scott Valentino have painted a delicate & enticing tale.

An outstanding, rare treasure of a read!

Igor Stiks is the editor of anthologies of new Croatian prose fiction & international short fiction in English. His fiction, literary criticism & essays have appeared widely in journals & reviews in the former Yugoslavia.
Russell Scott Valentino is the translator of Between Exile and Asylum by Predrag Matvejevic, Materada, & Persuasion and Rhetoric: Italian Literature and Thought, & the author of Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Tomislav Kuzmanovic is an MFA student in translation at the University of Iowa. He also lives in Iowa City.
(11/20/05)

Rebecca