Shame Shadows My Name
Italian writer and philosopher Michela Marzano has written extensively about ethics and politics. One day, in her early forties, she finds out that one of her father’s given names is Benito and starts looking into her family’s past.
Shame Shadows My Name is the story of Marzano’s investigation, retracing the journey of her grandfather Arturo, a respected magistrate and, she is to discover, a follower of Benito Mussolini and fascist of the first hour.
As she gets deeper into her research, Marzano reconstructs her own discomfort with the familial atmosphere in which she grew up, the clashes with her father, the suffering caused by his contempt for her mother and brother.
Fascism, buried beneath the ashes of shame, resurfaces in behaviours and relationships. The only antidote is to unearth it and stare it in the face.
Michela Marzano was born in Rome in 1970. She studied at the Normale Superiore in Pisa and since 1998 has been living in Paris, France, where she teaches moral philosophy at the Université Paris Descartes.
She writes for La Repubblica and La Stampa.
She is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books in French and Italian, which have been translated into many languages. L’amore è tutto: è tutto ciò che so dell’amore (UTET) won the Premio Bancarella 2014.
Her memoir Stirpe e vergogna (Rizzoli), won the Premio Mondello in 2022 and is published in English in 2024 by Gazebo Books as Shame Shadows My Name.
