In 1937, Rosetta Loy was a privileged five-year-old growing up among the well-to-do Catholic intelligentsia of Rome. But her childhood of indulgent nannies and summers in the mountains was also the world of Mussolini's fascist regime and the increasing oppression of Italian Jews. Loy interweaves the two Italys of her early years, revealing the wilful ignorance of her own family as one by one their Jewish neighbours disappeared. She indicts journalists and intellectuals for their blindness and passivity, and presents a searing and dispassionate record of the role of the Vatican and Catholic leadership in the devastation of Italian Jewry.
