The Lost Dresses of Italy

December 15, 2023
A 19th-century poet and a 20th-century fashion curator are the creative women whose lives intertwine in this mix of fact and fiction. The Italian city where Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet is the intriguing backdrop to this suspenseful dual-time-period drama about love and loss. In 1947, Marianne Baxter travels to Verona to help a longtime friend curate an exhibition of dresses that once belonged to the renowned Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. After World War II, the dresses were discovered in a trunk hidden in one of the city's museums. Marianne is a grieving American war widow determined to find out more about the dresses' history so she can infuse the exhibit with their backstory. She can't fathom why the enigmatic Christina hid them after visiting Italy nearly a century earlier, and the mystery deepens when she finds a threatening note tucked inside one of the gowns. In the novel's alternate storyline set in 1865, Christina discovers a letter and a vintage emerald pendant left to her by her late father. In the letter he asks that she travel to Italy to return a stolen book of Dante's poetry to one of Verona's libraries. Christina, like Marianne nearly a century later, hopes her trip to Verona will offer opportunities to start over, but an anonymous threat and a personal attack put her on guard. While this novel's two engaging storylines take place in different time periods, the similarities between Marianne and Christina enrich both narratives as each woman confronts threats, danger, and violence during her travels. Fans of Adriana Trigiani will delight in this novel's Italian flavor, and armchair travelers will relish its detailed accounts of Italian art, architecture, and history. Like a lovingly curated museum exhibit, McLaughlin's artful novel envelops readers in the artistic endeavors of its characters. History, mystery, and fashion blend in this alluring novel.

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January 1, 2024
It's 1947, and Italy is still recovering from WWII. Rufina convinces her friend Marianne, an American costume curator, to come to Verona to mount an exhibit of three well-preserved nineteenth-century gowns found in a hidden room of a palazzo-turned-museum. Marianne, still grieving the death of her husband, agrees, though she butts heads with museum director, Alessandro, who has bigger problems than a few lost dresses. The dresses belonged to Christina Rossetti, the poet whose brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, helped form the pre-Raphaelite movement. The narrative alternates between Marianne's diligent, resourceful curatorial work and Christina in 1865, as she, her mother, and her older brother William take a trip to Italy. The mystery of how the dresses came to be in the palazzo deepens when Marianne discovers a stolen book with instructions about its rightful return, which connects her to an Italian scholar. Rich with details of two historical periods, The Lost Dresses of Italy infuses romance, mystery, and a little bit of politics into a compelling tale of two women overcoming different forms of grief.

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