I am the less distinguished daughter of highly accomplished parents. My father was an American archaeologist and my mother, an Italian socialite.
Papa was second generation American. He met a doctor who spoke his language at Ellis Island who adopted him and sent him to Columbia University where he became a pioneer psychiatrist and neurologist.
He bunked with another captain, his lifelong friend George Marshall. They both ended the war as colonels. They left during a pogrom because of their Jewish faith and came to New York, living first in Harlem and then in Brooklyn. Mom was the eldest daughter, raised with chauffeurs and horses, the first to go to college and was in Rome in at the university. She was a secretary at the agricultural ministry and fell in love with the foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, with whom she had an illegitimate child, my sister, who still lives in Rome.
Roberta is twenty years older than me. I was raised wherever my father was assigned as an archaeologist and art historian so I grew up in Rome but also in London and Paris. He was also a journalist and owned four recording companies. My readers get to meet both my parents in my books. There I studied painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography and learned to throw a pot, smelt bronze, etc.
They were preparing me for a position in museum management. I returned to New York to work on my Ph. I became fascinated with the great public buildings and how they fell into disuse, crumbled and fell, or were saved to become churches after the fall of Rome in the fifth century.
