Lasting Photographs

By Luigi Barbano

A box of photographs washes ashore in Florida. Inside is a love story the Second World War tried to erase.

January 2010. Flying his seaplane low over the Gulf of Mexico, former photographer John Ragnar spots an unconscious diver on a deserted sand island. Floating beside his plane is a sealed ammunition box stamped with the emblem of Mussolini's Royal Italian Air Force.

Inside are black-and-white prints and Rolleiflex negatives, perfectly preserved for seventy-five years. They show a young woman on the Italian Riviera in 1935. She is radiant and in love, and she was photographed by someone she trusted completely.

With Katia, a NASA physicist on sabbatical who has just walked into his life, John follows the trail from Clearwater to the fishing village of Camogli. It leads him to a hillside villa with a secret hidden behind a basement wall, the dusty military archives of Rome, and a synagogue register in Galveston. Each answer raises a harder question. Who was the girl in the pictures? Why did her family vanish one October night in 1935? And how did a test pilot handpicked by Mussolini end up at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? Or did he?

Lasting Photographs is part mystery, part love story and part history told by the people who lived it. It moves between the sunlit Riviera of the 1930s and the Florida coast of today, and between a Europe darkening under the racial laws and the promise of freedom across the ocean.

The author is an Italian-born professional photographer and pilot who lives between Italy and Florida, and the novel is full of authentic detail: the light of Liguria, focaccia and white wine with fishermen at dawn, the feel of a Rolleiflex and of a seaplane's controls. The memories of wartime Italy come first-hand from the author's parents.

For readers who love dual-timeline WWII novels, Italian settings, and mysteries solved one photograph at a time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1091463166
• ISBN13: 9781091463165
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 198 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.0"