Lisa Clifford: The Promise: An Italian Romance

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

I approached this title with caution. The market is flooded with books by enthusiasts who wing into Tuscany, do up a villa, write authoritatively of the quaint Italians, their culture and food before winging back to their other lives. All without being able to speak a word of Italian. Journalist Lisa Clifford did it the hard way. At 16 she meets Paolo in Florence and embarks on a love affair lived between Florence and Sydney that was to last, amazingly, 20 years.

Clifford is a daughter of Australian fashion and deportment icon June Dally-Watkins who once debated feminism with Germaine Greer.

Needless to say, mother was made mincemeat of when her daughter discovered she was a closet feminist.

"I could see that what Germaine said was more important than the way she looked while saying it. I knew at that moment I was going to grow into more of a Germaine than a Miss Dally." Unfortunately, this had dire consequences for adapting to life as an Italian signora. A desire for an independent career and sharing household duties sent her back to Australia several times.

She made lists of pros and cons. The negatives outweighed the positives, among them suffocating families, ebullient table manners and homesickness.

A further downside was the prospect of having a baby in the local maternity hospital. Tales of blood-smeared corridors and women miscarrying alongside women in labour were a definite turnoff. Not to mention, I might add, the perpetual howls echoing from the delivery room, and student doctors removing episiotomy stitches with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.

Funny, engaging, honest, it wades through the mass of cliches that currently surrounds all things Italian with an Aussie earthiness refreshingly recognisable for New Zealanders.

Of the three stages in cross-cultural adjustment — honeymoon, resentment and acceptance — Clifford seems stuck between the second and third, and her cunningly plotted narrative, if somewhat contrived, keeps us guessing right to the end.

So despite the occasional irritatingly self-justifying tone, yes, I'd recommend it to anyone in the throes of a cross-cultural relationship anywhere. But for all those who have had, are having, or would like to have an Italian romance, and we are legion, this book is a must.

All that remains is to post off a copy to a daughter, that other survivor of the Siena Maternity Hospital, embarking on her own Italian romance. Ah, that's amore.

* Macmillan, $34.95

* Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance