07 Apr 2025
Debut author Anna Lucia has drawn on her experience of growing up as part of the Italian community in St Albans in her recently published novel, Broken Madonna.
Highly rated and recommended by initial readers, the novel starts in the mountains of post-WWII Italy. At an orphanage, fragile Elisabetta claims to see the Madonna and draws crowds to witness her miracles, but her only friend Adelina has doubts.
The consequences will last a lifetime, with part of the story set in St Albans from the late 1940s until the late 1990s, including a fictional local psychiatric hospital.
Anna was born in St Albans, and was a pupil at St Albans & Stephens Infant and Junior Schools and Loreto College. Her parents came to St Albans in the 1950s to work on Windridge Farm, part of a wave of Italian workers recruited as vital labour in local industries and healthcare.
From poor regions of Italy suffering after the end of the war, the local Italian community grew as family members and friends took up work opportunities to build better lives.
Straddling a traditional Italian upbringing and her English education, Anna remembers Italian dances and Italian classes, as at the time many workers thought they would one day return to Italy with their families.
The St Albans elements of Broken Madonna are recounted in a series of letters sent to Italy.
They tell of the circumstances of an Italian woman, who starts her marriage in a house that could be in Fleetville, having met an English officer during the war as a nurse at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. When her marriage fails, she moves to work and live at the local psychiatric hospital, doing a job that many Italian women did in reality.
Fondness for the St Albans of yesteryear shines through. Scenes recall the author’s own childhood memories of Saturday mornings being left in the children’s section of the old library on Victoria Street while her mother bought fruit and vegetables at the market.
Her mother’s experience as a cleaner and cook at a local home for the elderly find an echo in the story, with a character who introduces pasta dishes to the residents of a care home, initially to their scepticism, and then delight.
In the early 1970s, Anna recalls an Italian mobile
shopping van which came to their house in Fleetville, so that they could buy pasta, olive oil and passata – and for herself Nutella – products at that time not easily available and deemed ‘foreign’.
The Catholic church community has a strong role to play in the book, a reminder that for many years the Italian community had its own priest who would say mass in Italian every Sunday, 5pm at St Alban & St Stephen Catholic Church on Beaconsfield Road.
Baptisms, marriages and funerals were a big part of Italian family life. In Broken Madonna, Anna wanted to reflect some of this way of life and some of the challenges the Italian women in particular faced.
Anna explained: “One of the main characters has to leave behind all she has known in Italy and start all over again. Her story speaks of what it was like to build a new life, learn the language, adapt and yet hold on to Italian values. I haven’t seen these women represented in books and I wanted their voices to be heard.”
Broken Madonna has been described by readers as “compelling, hard to put down,” and “a captivating page turner” in intial reviews, and it is being enjoyed by readers of Elena Ferrante, Clare Chambers and Elif Shafak.
Now living in Brighton, Anna maintains connections with St. Albans. She is happy to engage with local book groups who may like to invite an author to discuss a book with a local link.
Broken Madonna is available in paperback and as an e-book (and is included in Kindle Unlimited for subscribers), from Amazon and to order from all bookshops. For more
information see Instagram for @authorannalucia, or visit www.annalucia.co.uk
