Casamassima, a small town in Puglia, is the starting point of this story, woven with shadows and light.
It is here that Antonia Fiermonte, the author’s Italian grandmother, was born. She marries René Letourneur in Paris, whose friend Jacques Zwobada burns with a silent love for her. Some stories echo through time like distant whispers, invisible threads linking past and present, dreams and memories. In this new novel, Antonia Yasmina Filali takes us to the beating heart of a family saga where love, passion, friendship, and ruptures intertwine in an extraordinary destiny. A journey into the souls of the characters, an open door to a world where absences weigh as heavily as presences.
Then emerges the figure of Enzo Fiermonte, Antonia’s brother. Still a teenager, he walks across the land of Puglia to meet his fate: a journey marked by struggles, falls, and triumphs. Guardian of family memory, Antonia Yasmina Filali dedicates her life to being a bridge between generations. This novel is an inner voyage in search of what, etched in the heart, stands as a bulwark against oblivion.
Antonia Yasmina Filali presents her novel An Italian Family:
A crossroads of voices and characters from an ancient, remote land. Driven by fate, they set off on an adventure, leaving Puglia behind without ever looking back. She is the one I seek, desperately. Antonia, my Italian grandmother... A grandmother who died too young and whom I never knew. For us, she will be the absence. In the house of my childhood, Fontenay holds her image in a breath. She is everywhere—in the drawings, in the plasterwork, in the sculptures, painted, shaped, chiselled by artists mad with love. Her fragmented body will be endlessly revisited. Her thick hair fixes the charcoal around a face suspended between two ages. She is there, breathing. Then, incredibly, the figure of that brother adored by the masses appears: Enzo Fiermonte, the Italian champion, the pride of the South. Late in his life, he told me about the Italian migrants’ conquest of the Americas, his land populated by dark spells, Puglia, fame, his encounters. And at the journey’s end, a shocking fate, the glory of a family. In Fontenay, the scene opens on three souls who will transform this enclosure into a magical place, beneath the trees. Three souls who avoided nothing but, on the contrary, embraced feelings to reveal themselves beyond time, imagination, creation. For one and the other, for all, for all those who will receive their trace. Two men, one woman... Antonia.
“You cannot escape death, but you can escape life.” She is the one who says it. At the end of his life, my great-uncle Enzo lived in the Roman countryside, in Mentana. I went to see him to hear about her; he spoke to me of himself... Thus begins the story of my Italian family.
About the author
Antonia Yasmina Filali was born in Paris. She holds a State Doctorate in Art History from the Sorbonne University and is the founding President of the Orient-Occident Foundation (1994), recognised as being of public utility. For her commitment to migrants and young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, she received in 2016 in Kigali the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Schwab Foundation (World Economic Forum) and subsequently the French Republic’s “International Human Rights Award.” Since 2015, she has worked with her brother to create a chain of hotels: The Fiermontina Family Collection and the Fiermonte Museum, both dedicated to their grandmother. Her publications include Fulgurances Gharbaoui, ONA Foundation, 1995 (a key reference book on Gharbaoui, the first Moroccan abstract painter) and Les Passagers de l'oubli, a novel, Senso Unico Éditions, 2006.