Desmond O'Grady

After Italian troops had invaded the Papal States to establish the nation’s capital in Rome in 1870, Italian Catholics were prohibited from voting in political elections. When this policy began to be relaxed in late 1918, a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), founded the Partitio Popolare Italiano (PPI) which was to be aconfessional but ‘inspired by Catholic principles’. It was the precursor of the Christian Democratic party that has ruled Italy for the past thirty years.

As John Sligo spent thirteen years in Rome up to 1982, he experienced vita when life was still dolce in Hollywood-by-the-Tiber where he was one of those expatriates who hobnobbed with both exiled royal families and political refugees. Now a Sydney resident and prize-winning novelist, Sligo worked in Rome for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation and also taught in English-language schools, but these tales mainly show him as a bon vivant, not only in the Italian capital but on excursions to Greece and India.

Desmond O’Grady is uniquely placed to interpret Australia for Italians and Italy for Australians. He grew up in suburban Melbourne, but as a journalist, biographer, and writer of fiction he has spent most of his working life in Rome.