#RivetingReviews: Paul Burke reviews THE BISHOP’S VILLA by Sacha Naspini

The war is finally encroaching on the village of Le Case in Tuscany in early winter, 1943. It is now occupied by German and Italian troops, as the allied advance into Italy gets ever closer. This is a community distanced from the conflict until now, previously cut off and little changed for a century. The people of this self-sufficient backwater are about to face the gravest of moral and political choices as they are longer isolated from the chaos that exists beyond the tree lines.

René is a cobbler, a damaged soul, withdrawn since an accident at a lathe left him permanently injured, feeling unworthy because of it. He is shy, a loner, almost comfortably isolated, even taciturn. That is until now. He has one longtime friend, Anna, whose son Edoardo joined the partisans, news has arrived of his death at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Grief stricken and angry, Anna vows to take up the resistance cause in his name. To René’s dismay she leaves for the fight and he covers for her absence as best he can while dealing with the pain of her absence.

Things worsens when the fascist grip on the area tightens and all the region’s Jews are rounded up. The local Bishop is only too willing to rent his villa as a detention centre, people arrive here before deportation to Auschwitz.

Daily life is eroded by the presence of the soldiers, locals harden to the Jewish prisoners, openly hostile when they collect supplies. Few are sympathetic and many enjoy lording it over the condemned.

When news arrives that captured partisans are being held at the Villa, among them a woman, René fears it could be Anna. He knows he can no longer avoid taking sides. When he acts, it becomes a matter of survival, trying to live long enough to see the allies arrive.

Told from René’s perspective, this is an intimate narrative, a tale of an ordinary man and extraordinary courage underpinned by the obverse; the sinister banality of fascism. A young soldier hunting a brothel, a young Jewish woman scolded for looking in a shop window. Collectively the terrible acts of the Holocaust.

We see Anna and René stand up for a belief. Anna can only retain her sanity in her grief by acting and René is emboldened by her. The narrative is elegantly structured, measured tones allow the tragedy to unfold skilfully, it’s both beguiling and disturbing. The pages are haunted by the Jewish people spirited away in the night, their fates glimpsed in the half light. The brutality occurs off the page but has seismic impact. This is the moment of greatest danger for all just before the arrival of the Allies.

The final section of the novel is set twenty years after the war exploring the aftermath of the wartime events in Le Case. Where there should have been a reckoning, justice for the murdered, the truth was buried and forgotten. This is a reimagining of real events, the story of the only rented prison camp in Italy, actually a seminary, all at the behest of the local bishop. A poignant, moving and memorable read.

Reviewed by Paul Burke

THE BISHOP’S VILLA

Written by Sacha Naspini

Translated by Clarissa Botsford

Published by Europa Editions (2025)

March 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Paul Burke writes reviews, interviews, articles and features for crimefictionlover.com and crimetime.co.uk. He is editor and presenter of the Crime Time FM podcast and is a judge for the CWA Historical Dagger. Paul is a book collector, lover of literature in translation and a crime fiction aficionado. His first book An Encyclopedia of Spy Fiction will be published in early 2026.

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