Dietro Gli Scogli de Zara, by Nicolò Luxardo De Franchi

The book tells the tragic story of brothers Nicolò and Pietro Luxardo, highly respected entrepreneurs and important exporters from the Italian city of Zara (today Zadar, Croatia), who were arrested and murdered during the Yugoslav occupation of the city in 1944. Against the backdrop of a war-torn city, the brothers’ fate unfolds according to an inscrutable pattern, culminating in the murder of Nicolò and his wife Bianca at the hands of unknown Yugoslav partisans and the mysterious disappearance of Pietro. The Luxardo family’s years-long efforts to learn the truth about the fate of their loved ones, patiently sifting through every official response from the authorities, leads to a labyrinth of hypotheses; the reader is gradually led, almost like in a detective story, to embrace the most likely explanation. The story of “Signor Piero” and “Signor Nicolò” is echoed in the broader story of the entire city of Zara, huddled around the family’s austere Palazzo Barcagno and behind those rocks that tell of the suffering of an entire population.