Review of Ciao Bella by Carla McKay

Ciao Bella is a travel book with a difference. Helena Frith Powell goes to Italy to write a book about the glamour of Italian women but instead ends up recalling her first meeting with her real father and retracing a Grand Tour of Italy he took her on when she was an impressionable fourteen years old. The book moves between past and present as Frith Powell searches, once more, for her elusive and contrary father, an Italian intellectual who spends as much time advising her on sex as he does quoting Dante at her in an effort to improve her Italian.

The past is brought alive partly by this eccentric and larger-than-life character but also because we are told it through the eyes of a young English girl whose idea of a good dinner is egg, beans and chips at a Little Chef and who has never seen a palm tree, been in love, let alone sailed on a yacht and sat in the Royal box at the Scala in Milan. Frith Powell’s father shows her, and the reader, a world of glamour, culture and beauty. But it is not without disadvantages; he is a compelling but at times cruel character.

Frith Powell’s wry observations about modern Italy and descriptions of her first visit to Italy; the colours, the noise, the food, are told with a light and amusing style. Her search for her Italian identity and sexual awakening are things we can all relate to. I particularly liked the Venice chapters where she stays with a Venetian artist and re-lives the “erotic tour” of Venice her father took her on more than twenty years ago. There is also a hilarious chapter where her family manage to secure a coveted truffle - then argue as how best to cook it. Ciao Bella is an ideal stocking filler, an amusing, well written and enlightening read. I defy anyone not to enjoy it.

Carla McKay is a former literary editor of the Daily Mail.