Dove non mi hai portata: Mia madre, un caso di cronaca (Italian Edition) -> Dove non mi hai portata: Mia madre, un caso di cronaca (Italian Edition)

In 1965, a man and a woman, after abandoning their eight-month-old daughter in Villa Borghese park, commit an extreme act. In 2021, that abandoned child was Maria Grazia Calandrone. Determined to discover the truth, she returns to the places where her mother lived, suffered, worked, and loved. By investigating the past, she sheds new light on her life. "Where Haven't You Taken Me" is an intimate yet public book, deeply moving and at the same time clear-eyed. By traversing the mirror of time, it tells a slice of Italian history and the interrupted lives of women. But it is also an emotional investigation that leaves no one untouched, not even the reader.

When Lucia and Giuseppe arrive in Rome in the summer of 1965, they have their eight-month-old daughter with them. They are in love, but they cannot shake the unease of being pursued. Lucia had fled from an abusive husband whom she had been forced to marry and who humiliated her every day. She had tried to build a new life with Giuseppe. However, under the laws of the time, she had committed serious crimes: adultery and abandonment of the marital home. Before slipping into the waters of the Tiber under mysterious circumstances, the couple left their daughter on a lawn in Villa Borghese, hoping that someone would take care of her. Over fifty years later, that child, now a mother herself, sets out to uncover what truly happened to her parents.

Like a detective, Maria Grazia Calandrone reconstructs Lucia and Giuseppe's movements, lists the objects they left behind, researches the time it takes a body to die in water, and the functioning of the post in 1965, to understand when and where her parents sent the letter to "l'Unità" explaining their actions. After "Shine Like Life," in which the author addressed her difficult relationship with her adoptive mother, "Where Haven't You Taken Me" explores an even more intimate and complex knot. By investigating her parents' story through the news articles of the time, Calandrone brings to light the portrait of an Italy tired of war but not of coercive rules. A country that pushed a strong and vital woman to feel lost and without an escape. Until she paid with her life for her choice of love.

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