Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, raised in Wisconsin, found the other half of her voice in Italy, where Italian life took her ever more deeply into beauty, otherness, and the meaning of equality. In September 2021, FSG will publish her latest book, Silence and Silences. Its appearance is much anticipated as an original and needed comment on our times. This year, 2020, Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy, has been reissued by FSG. Introduced by Patricia Hampl who identifies the book as “enduring,” indeed, “eternal”, writes its style required “radical honesty, a form of inventive humility.” Having spent more than forty years in Parma and Rome, Wilde-Menozzi sees Italy not as a traveler but as a citizen-immigrant with deep roots, “a woman describing the flow of life itself.” Praised as a “passionate,” “fierce,” and “original” writer, The Other Side of the Tiber, Reflections on Time in Italy, FSG, was chosen by Longitude as one of the best ten travel books of the year and a gift book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, Toscanelli’s Ray, set in Berlusconi’s Florence, (“her sense of human intimacy unerring,”) was published by Cadmus Editions.