Setting Smackdown: France Vs. Italy!
Welcome back to Setting Smackdown, where two different romance settings brawl it out for first place in our hearts! (If you missed our first Smackdown, Georgian vs. Victorian, you can find it HERE!).
This edition of Setting Smackdown: France Vs. Italy!
Yes, it’s the Battle of the Latin Lovers, as the lands of two Romance languages duke it out to be the favorite of Romancelandia. Will it be Paris, the City of Lights, or Venice, the Floating City? A Provençal lavender field or a Sicilian vineyard? Pasta or patisserie? Bring it on!
ROUND ONE: Contemporaries!
Harlequin sends Italy out swinging with its inexhaustible supply of Italian tycoons, condés, and vineyard owners. Try Liz Fielding’s Flirting with Italian, for a charming tale of a teacher who falls for a man who is all three. Does that seem a bit lightweight? Katrina Jackson lands a heavier punch with The Hitman – a jilted bride taking a solo honeymoon discovers her neighbor is an assassin for the mafia.
France isn’t going to stand by on either count. In Karina Halle’s dark romance Discretion, the heroine finds herself recuperating from a mugging in a hotel room paid for by a French fashion heir who is keeping secrets. And Laura Florand gives us two beloved French contemporaries: A Crown of Bitter Orange takes us into the perfume industry in Provence, and The Chocolate Thief highlights… uh, chocolate. Right. France also has a strong YA contender, as Stephanie Perkins gives a wonderful Parisian boarding school setting in Anna and the French Kiss.
ROUND TWO: 19th CENTURY
Italy: A heroine unlocks her musical talents in Venice in Kate Noble’s Let It Be Me
France: See the dawn of the age of cinema in Dance by Judy Cuevas!
Italy: Meet lusty writers in Lessons of Desire by Madeline Hunter!
France: À votre santé! Enemies-to-lovers spirits manufacturers try to win customers in Adriana Herrera’s A Caribbean Heiress in Paris!
Italy: A courtesan has treasonous letters in Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase.
France: Where would we be without Joanna Bourne’s Spymasters
ROUND THREE: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Time for those knights in armor to shine! Let’s lead with France. Susan Wiggs’ The Mistress of Normandy earned a rare A+ here. Or try Shelly Thacker’s time-travel story, Forever His.
Italy’s response? Tasha Alexander’s Death in the Floating City (part of the Lady Emily mystery series) includes both 19th century and Renaissance Venetian settings. For a pure medieval, Laura Kinsale’s Shadowheart will break your heart with its truly tortured hero Allegretto. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin, while largely set in Cambridge, stars protagonists from the diverse medieval medical school in Salerno.
WAIT! From behind, it’s A SURPRISE ATTACK! The French Revolution has entered the ring!
A Rose at Midnight by Anne Stuart stars a chef out for revenge. Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series has multiple French Revolution-set stories. And what’s the French Revolution without its archetypal hero, the Scarlet Pimpernel? Try Surrender to a Stranger by Karyn Monk for an original Pimpernel hero!
BUT ITALY IS NOT OUT. With one more ace up its sleeve – or rather, tucked in its toga – Italy retaliates with Ancient Rome! If you swooned for Russell Crowe as Maximus Decimus Meridius, then these romance novels might be your personal fields of Elysium. Carla Capshaw’s retired gladiator falls for his Christian slave in The Gladiator, and Michelle Style’s not-retired gladiator falls for a Roman lady in The Gladiator’s Honor! (We do love us a gladiator).
So what say you, readers? Who is the ultimate champion of Setting Smackdown: France Vs. Italy?
~ Caroline Russomanno
Italy is winning here, peeps!
Both countries appeal to me as settings, but many times I do not get a real feel for landscape and culture from romances — a romance that focuses on the characters’ emotions may say very little about settings.
Until Covid hit, I read a few contemporaries, and most were Harlequin Presents for the brief angsty hit I got from them. Many seemed to be set in Italy, few seemed to be set in France (maybe reflecting UK readership preference?), but none of them really gave me a sense of Italy or a sense of France. The one exception is Lucy Gordon’s novels set in Italy, and I don’t think it is coincidental that she is married to a Venetian.
A lot of Georgian and Regency novels involve France or the French in one way or another, and I like that aspect.
If I *had* to choose, I would choose France. But I would prefer not to choose. There are plenty of other countries out there that apparently don’t appeal as much to romance writers and readers — I’m looking at you, Holy Roman Empire/German Confederation — as France or Italy.
As with the last Setting Smackdown… I honestly don’t prefer one to the other. IRL, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in France, I speak (tolerable) French and I love it there. If my personal circumstances were different I might well be living there now! I have little experience of Italy however. When it comes to books, as I said last time, I don’t mind as long as the setting is well used and accurately described.
Excellent post Caroline! Although I am once again amazed by how few of your examples I’ve read – two in particular: Madeline Hunter and Loretta Chase. And both titles set in Italy with A ratings! On the TBR they go.
These will be the first romances set in Italy I’ve ever read, I think. (No, I just checked my reading log: Lily Morton’s The Cuckoo’s Call is set partially in Italy and Spain.) So looking forward to checking out all the Italian suggestions!
I’m very excited that you haven’t read all of them and you’ve added them! One of my goals is to bring some of our old DIKs back to the surface so people can (re)discover them!
LOL… The Scarlet Pimpernel and Joanna Bourne’s Spy Masters put France on top for me, but there is something about Venice that is sooo romantic. I just can’t decide. Can I get servings of both please.
I like both locations a lot. IRL.
And so books where the country, the food, the moods of the countries are well done, are enjoyable to me. Even when it is foreigners visiting, if they visit a “real France” or “real Italy”, I enjoy the setting.
That said, it feels to me like Romancelandia France is like a” historical in costumes not in truth”, it is a very interesting lovely invented France – both American and English writers since forever (Scarlet Pimpernel, Heyer, Roberta Gellis’ Heiresses) have a vision of France that is more about them than about anything French, to me. Or it is about romantic erotic dreams of freedom that Anglosaxons express as France.
Italy is more real, in romance, I feel. The heroes get to be Uber-Italians, but recognizable as Italians, even to themselves, I think.
Still, both work for me, most of the time.
I just need to screw my head on the right way, and not be unhappy when the French people are all caricatures, nearly always.
When much, much, much too young to appreciate them, I pinched my mother’s Sergeanne Golon “Angelique” books. French-set, French H/h, French author et vive le naughtiness!!
Same here – and then Juliette Benzoni series.
That was character & setting-wise completely French, and definitely loveliest naughtiness!!
Pasta over patisserie any time for me. I could eat and drink my way from Milan to Palermo with great pleasure. My DH says I could have done it in a tin hat for free during WW2.