In this exceptional travel book, Helena Frith Powell travels through Italy with her father to discover the Italian family she never knew about. In a rare twist of fate, Helena Frith Powell grew up in Newbury as a shy girl, oblivious of her extrovert Italian family. But, at the age of 14, she was suddenly rudely awakened to the truth, when her real father wrote to her and invited her to come to Italy. Her Italian-style adolescence is guided by her Lothario father, her lying aunt and her doting grandmother. While writing this memoir fourteen years later, she reestablishes contact with her father, who ran out of her wedding, and finally finds their common ground. In this funny, moving and entertaining journey to the places she visited with her father, Helena combines descriptions of Italy, its food, fashion, culture and people to get to grips with a foreign culture that is genetically her own.
