Francesca Melandri’s “Cold Feet” is her most personal book to date

Francesca Melandri has written her most personal book: a letter to her father, who fought with Hitler’s troops against the Soviet Union. It’s about the really big questions: What is war? What peace? An encounter in South Tyrol.

It’s not just any place where we meet Francesca Melandri. The Italian writer makes her relationship to the meeting point of Bruneck in South Tyrol clear before she has even sat down properly. “I call this my Zweimat,” she explains on this late summer day in the Puster Valley and only then settles down on the corner bench of the hotel bar. Specifically, she not only means the town with almost 17,000 inhabitants where she lived for years and where she still comes in the summer, but also the Val Gardena in the Dolomites, where her father built a house under the Sassolungo and she did as a child spent the holidays, Easter and Christmas every summer. So, more broadly, all of South Tyrol, the Alto Adige. Melandri explains that she doesn’t really want to call home, after all, she’s from Rome, where she was born in 1964. But here “is the place of my heart”.