Shame Shadows My Name

Shame Shadows My Name is the searing memoir of Michela Marzano - moral philosopher, columnist for La Repubblica and La Stampa, and former member of the Italian Parliament - translated into English for the first time by Gila Walker. Originally published in Italian as Stirpe e vergogna (winner of the Premio Mondello 2022) and in French as Mon nom est sans mémoire, this is an act of courageous personal and historical excavation.

The discovery that her father's birth certificate lists "Ferruccio Michele Arturo Vittorio Benito" among his given names sends Marzano into the family archive. What she finds dismantles the story she has always told herself: her grandfather Arturo, long described as a royalist patriot, was in fact one of Mussolini's earliest followers, a fascist of the first hour whose political loyalties were subsequently erased from family memory.

Weaving together genealogical research, historical documents, personal letters, and psychoanalytic reflection, Marzano confronts not only her grandfather's complicity but her own family's silence - and Italy's enduring culture of forgetting. Intimate and unflinching, Shame Shadows My Name is both a daughter's reckoning with a father who cannot speak of the past, and a philosopher's argument that memory is the only antidote to inherited shame.