Troubled by a photo of her grandmother living it up in Mussolini’s Italy, the author of Free delves into archive and memory to uncover the truth
I
t starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.
The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi’s grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. “Morally degenerate” was one comment. “Fascist collaborator” another.
And so, in Indignity, Ypi sets off to find out exactly who her grandmother was. It is, she writes, partly out of a sense of duty, to defend her family member from the trolls – a kind of 21st-century version of EP Thompson’s famous call for history to rescue the dead from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. But partly, Ypi admits, it is because she finds the photo unsettling. How to reconcile her beloved, compassionate grandmother with this glamorous young woman living it up in Mussolini’s Italy?
