An intimate novel and at the same time an investigation into a cold case that affects the author first hand. In Dove non mi hai portata, author Maria Grazia
Calandrone looks into the story of a man and a woman who killed themselves by jumping into the Tiber River, leaving behind their eight-month-old child in
a public park. That man and woman were her father and her mother; that baby was her.

Now, many years later, the author and her daughter Anna return to the places where her mother lived, suffered, worked, and loved. They go back to the park where her mother abandoned her and to the edge of the river that swept her away. From all the clues, Calandrone manages to reconstruct her mother’s
life: her birth on a farm in Molise; her love for Tonino, the son of sharecroppers, which met with the disapproval of her parents; her eventual marriage to Luigi, a violent man who humiliated her daily and forced her into a life of toil; her eventual escape with Giuseppe – finally, true love – to Milan; Luigi’s contestation that she had abandoned the marriage; the birth of a beloved but illegitimate child; an attempt to survive by working long hours as a cleaning woman, and the feeling of not being able to make it... Dove non mi hai portata is an intimate yet deeply public book. It reveals a clear portrait of society in those years, an Italy run ragged by war but still structured around demanding rules, rules that led a strong, vibrant woman to be branded as an adulteress, to feel as though there was no way out. A woman who paid for her choice to follow love with her life.