Set against the political turmoil of the twentieth century, it portrays the fantasies and the hopes, true and false, that the women carry with them as they journey from the starkly beautiful landscape of southern Italy to the glamorous, trend-setting Rome of the 1950s and '60s, to New York City's art world in the 1970s and '80s.

The story begins with the marriage of Lorenzo Strada, an artist, and Renée, the beautiful Tunisian woman he meets on the Riviera in the 1920s. They winter in Paris and spend summers in a farmhouse in Puglia lovingly restored by Lorenzo. For Renée, the house comes to symbolize Lorenzo's determination to control and isolate her, and on the brink of World War II, she leaves him and their five-year-old daughter, Alba, and moves to Germany with her lover. Raised in Puglia by Lorenzo and a colorless, conventional step-mother, Alba makes her way to Rome after the war, where she marries Oliviero, an up-and-coming screenwriter, and is swept into the wild, promiscuous world of Italy's booming film industry. When Oliviero dies under mysterious circumstances, Alba's daughters, Alina and Isabella, face a future tainted by rumors of betrayal and unanswered questions that reach deep into the family's history. Each seeks escape, Alina by fleeing her homeland for New York City, Isabella, by joining the Italian terrorist movement.

Francesca Marciano's evocative portraits of rural Italy, Rome, and New York City create a vivid backdrop for the novel. Specific in detail, universal in its import, Casa Rossa is a profoundly moving exploration of the willful manipulation of personal and historical memory.