Iris Origo

Iris Origo's most famous book, her classic study of the life and times of a medieval Italian merchant. In 1870, an astonishing cache, containing some 150,000 letters and great numbers of business documents, came to light. Iris Origo drew on this material to paint, in detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di...

War in Val d'Orcia is the elegantly simple chronicle of daily life at La Foce, a manor in a Tuscan no-man's land bracketed by foreign invasion and civil war. Writing with simplicity and grace, Iris Origo describes how she and her husband managed to help refugee children from Genoa and Turin, hide escaped Allied prisoners of war, and stand up...

Iris Origo, one of the twentieth century's great diarists, was born in England in 1902. As a child, she moved between England, Ireland, Italy, and America, never quite belonging anywhere. It was only when she married an Italian man that she came to rest in one country. Fifteen years later, that country would be at war with her own. With...