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Chapters (73)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. Part One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Part Two
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-One
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Part Three
  33. Twenty-Six
  34. Twenty-Seven
  35. Twenty-Eight
  36. Twenty-Nine
  37. Thirty
  38. Thirty-One
  39. Thirty-Two
  40. Thirty-Three
  41. Thirty-Four
  42. Thirty-Five
  43. Thirty-Six
  44. Thirty-Seven
  45. Thirty-Eight
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Part Four
  51. Forty-Three
  52. Forty-Four
  53. Forty-Five
  54. Forty-Six
  55. Forty-Seven
  56. Forty-Eight
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. Fifty-Two
  61. Fifty-Three
  62. Epilogue
  63. Author’s Note
  64. Acknowledgments
  65. Discover More
  66. Reading Group Guide
  67. Discussion Questions
  68. ESSAY FROMDIANA GIOVINAZZO
  69. Antoinette’s Sister
  70. Chapter One
  71. Chapter Two
  72. About the Author
  73. Praise forThe Woman in Red

ESSAY FROM
DIANA GIOVINAZZO

When I was a teenager my aunt showed me a black-and-white photo of an Italian soldier taken during World War II. It was in a box mixed with photos of birthdays, Christmases, and scores of family Sunday suppers. The lone young man in the photo stood tall in his pristine foreign uniform, staring back at us from the small rectangular box. There was no doubt he was a relative: Not only did he have the tell-tale Giovinazzo eyebrows, he loosely resembled one of my cousins. The back of the photograph was blank. No hint of who this boy could be, or if he even survived the war. No clues as to who he was or what he meant to my grandparents. Nothing.

So many of my grandparents’ stories were lost to us along with the immigration stories of my great grandparents. My Calabrian grandfather died a few years before I was born, and I have precious few memories of my Sicilian grandmother before her untimely death when I was a child. Perhaps that’s why the picture of the soldier stayed with me well into my adulthood as I began to comb through the historical archives for the ghosts of my family. When I started to search the Italian archives those questions shifted from how?  to why?

The question of why my family immigrated to the United States became my primary focus. Why did my great grandparents leave Italy in 1913? What drove them to gather their few belongings and start over in New York?

I was having the traditional Italian family dinner at my parents’ house when my father and I began to theorize what happened in Italy when our family made the journey. The subject of Italian Unification, also known as the Risorgimento, came up. That was when my father said “You should read about the Garibaldi’s and Anita Garibaldi in particular. I think you would like her.” Following his advice, I picked up a biography of Anita, and he was right. I was immediately taken by her fierceness. This was a woman who stood, unfazed, on the bow of a ship as canon fire whizzed by her head. She insisted her life was not valuable, that the freedom she fought for was all that mattered. Throughout her life, she believed in equality for everyone, regardless of gender or race.

It was this pre-feminist thought that lured me in. I say pre-feminism because the feminism that we recognize today can be traced back to only 1848 in Seneca Falls. But while the suffragettes were debating how to accomplish their goals, Anita was already sacrificing for the benefit of the citizens of three countries.