The Florence Sisters

Tessa Harris

HALF-ENGLISH and half-Italian, Angelina Leone loves Florence, the beautiful city where she was born and where she now lives under the watchful eye of her formidable Great Aunt Agatha. But it’s the summer of 1940, Mussolini has declared war on Britain... and now every Englishman and woman has become the enemy.

Tessa Harris – whose thrilling historical novels include The Paris Notebook, The Light We Left Behind and The Tuscan Daughter – sweeps us away to wartime Italy where the coming conflict threatens not just millions of lives but the Renaissance city’s centuries-old collection of priceless artwork and sculpture.

And what a heart-pounding and unforgettable tale it is... a gripping, breathtaking  page-turner which, Harris (pictured below) reveals, was inspired by Franco Zefferelli’s 1999 film Tea With Mussolini, loosely based on his own life and that of his English tutor Mary O’Neill who belonged to a group of cultured, no-nonsense Englishwomen living in Il Duce’s Florence and nicknamed the Scorpioni. With a star-crossed romance weaving enticingly through the fast-paced action, secrets, suspense and ever-present threat from Mussolini’s fascist bureaucrats and marauding Blackshirts, readers are plunged into the lives of the plucky Angelina (Lina) and a group of elderly English expat women prepared to risk their lives to save the city’s treasures from Nazi looters.

In the summer of 1940, Italy is on the precipice of war and the beautiful city of Florence is simmering not just from the heat but from the tension that could boil over at any moment. It’s a worrying time for Il Scorpione, the Englishwomen who have lived in Florence for many years and now find their genteel way of life under serious threat by the approach of the Nazis.

Founder of the group, the English Ladies’ Arts Appreciation Society, is the indomitable Agatha Fortescue-Smythe who refuses to be put off her stride even when Fascist leader Mussolini declares war on England and France, and orders the closure of tea rooms and bookshops.

Agatha’s great-niece Lina Leone, an art historian specialising in the Renaissance, is determined to protect the aunt who has been her closest family since her Italian father died many years ago and her English mother more or less abandoned Lina when she remarried. When the women of Il Scorpione are threatened with internment, Lina makes a secret deal with the city’s thuggish mayor to authenticate art works ruthlessly stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis. In return, Agatha and the other elderly women will be guaranteed safe passage across the city.

Meanwhile, gallery owner and one of Florence’s major art dealers, Edoardo Bernini, crosses paths with Lina and a spark is lit between them. But Aunt Agatha warns her off the handsome, mysterious Edoardo who, she is told, is ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing.’

Despite Edoardo’s murky past, his dangerous attraction,  and the rumours that he could be a Nazi collaborator, Lina falls for what she sees as his ‘softer side’ while Edoardo is drawn to the

‘something’ that smoulders under Lina’s cool, English exterior. But when she comes across a priceless portrait – one that she cannot bear to see seized by the Germans – Lina declares the masterpiece a fake and in doing so, sets off a chain of events with consequences more deadly than she could ever imagine.

Set against the heat and turmoil of wartime Florence where ‘suspicion and anxiety hung in the air’ and Mussolini’s secret police were a constant presence, Lina and Edoardo’s simmering and potentially dangerous love affair plays out in a vortex of real history, suspense, secrets, romance and danger. With fascinating background on Italian history, and based on real events, Harris’ drama-packed story brings to visceral life the courage and tenacity of those brave souls who risked all to stop some of Europe’s greatest masterpieces from falling into the hands of the plundering Nazis.

But in the febrile atmosphere of a city simmering with tensions, The Florence Sisters is also an eye-opening reminder that Italy’s declaration of war in 1940 meant many British citizens, some of them people like the Scorpione who had been living in Italy for decades, were suddenly regarded as the enemy and under threat of being transported to internment camps. 

Increasingly unsure of who she can trust in a country fast sinking into the grip of a fascist, warmongering dictator, and determined to rescue both her beloved aunt and what she can of Florence’s precious Renaissance treasures, Lina’s gripping and emotional journey through the fallout from a deadly deceit cannot help but capture readers’ hearts... and is a page-turner not to be missed!
(HQ, paperback, £9.99)