(6 Research Tips for Writing Nonfiction.)

I learned this recently as I waded through my boxes of notebooks, interviews and research that I have done in the city’s ancient archives and museums over the past decades.

Even since I first stepped off the train in Bologna in 1988, and then descended through its famed medieval porticos like a beguiled flaneur, I knew I would one day write a cultural history of this northern Italian city. In the last two years, I have finally sat down to write that long overdue book.

Bologna is the one city I have always called home over the past three decades, even when I lived elsewhere.

And yet, as my 91-year-old mother recently asked me as I visited her in Cochise County, on the Arizona-Mexico border, in a time of so many crises in our country, how on earth can I be working on a book now about medieval towers or the genius of 17th century Baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani—among other historical gems in a place art critique John Berger called the “improbable city.”  

My mother, a coal miner’s daughter, whose father took part in the bitter coal wars for union recognition and civil rights, is not alone in her question. I receive nonstop emails and texts from other writer friends, historians, archaeologists, and artists, all consumed and their projects derailed by the daily exigencies of dealing with random budget cuts and job losses, attacks on academic freedom, endless wars, and the denial of due process guaranteed in our constitution for all residents in our country. 

Perhaps Bologna is best known for its gastronomic wonders, its UNESCO heritage recognition, or the 1,000-year-old seat of the oldest university in the West—the original alma mater, which shaped Dante, Petrarca, Copernicus, Lavinia Fontana, Mozart, and Umberto Eco, among so many others, including my wife, in its great halls. One of my journalism exemplars, Margaret Fuller, reminded Americans in her correspondence in 1847 of Bologna’s fame as the “paradise of women,” pointing out the city’s tradition of championing women painters, writers, scientists, and thinkers as the “soul of society.”

But John Adams, who I chronicled in one of my past books on his attacks on journalism and his role in persecuting critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts, now dictates my Bologna state of mind. The Aurora newspaper in Philadelphia had accused Adams in 1798 of realigning with “a despotic rather than a republican state,” and serving the financial interests of a small group of wealthy merchants.

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In London, frantically writing A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in 1787, Adams sought to lay out why Americans were adamant about choosing a three-branch form of government, which ensured the checks and balances missing in European monarchies.

Adams highlighted Bologna for two reasons. First, he admired the city for abolishing slavery in 1256, as proscribed in the cherished document Liber Paradisus (“The Book of Paradise”). Secondly, Adams encouraged all young Americans to learn the Italian language (as he did), in order to master the arts, science, and literature in the country, including its history. In Bologna, specifically, he spent reams of pages detailing the machinations of warring factions in the medieval period, and their persecution of enemies, retribution and vengeance between opposing sides, and the tragedy of “streets that ran with human blood,” despite the city’s extraordinary role as the European center of education and rationalism in the medieval period. 

Adams admonished his readers, and all Americans, to never forget Bologna’s “final catastrophe of all such governments, the establishment of absolute power in a single man.”

Adams’ concerns, of course, echoed his earlier writings, in his Thoughts on Government in 1776. Declaring that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, Adams concluded “the dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice.”

Bologna had not cornered the market on submitting to the authoritarianism of a single man, of course. But the medieval city, among other cities in Italy and Europe, Adams told his readers, was full of “excellent warning for the people of America.”

That perhaps is now the best reason to write a book on Bologna, and heed Adams’ message in defense of the American constitution, and the absolute power of a single man. 

The post History Prompts: How Can I Write a Book on Medieval Bologna When Our Country Is Coming Undone? appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Writer’s Digest is headed to Italy! Join editor-in-chief Amy Jones and senior editor Robert Lee Brewer May 3–10, 2025, for an Italian getaway to inspire your stories, learn from writers, and finish that manuscript!

“This year, Writer’s Digest is hosting its first overseas writing retreat to Tuscany,” says Amy Jones. “This is actually half tour, half writing retreat—the best of both worlds, because you get to see a bunch of incredible buildings and art and history to inspire your writing, and then you get the dedicated time to actually do the writing.”

Listen as Amy and Robert discuss the itinerary, what to expect, what to look forward to, and more!

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(5 Unconventional Ways to Structure Your Memoir.)

What I love about writing fiction is creating characters, but with the memoir, the “characters” were some of the people most beloved in my life—my parents and grandparents—and I’d be exposing them more than creating them. After Italy tells the story of my American mother and Italian father, whose arranged marriage was brokered by their parents in 1948 to facilitate my father’s immigration to the U.S., where he could establish his medical career and send help back to his family in war-ravaged Calabria. Everyone involved understood the utilitarian nature of the arrangement, except for the 18-year-old bride, who believed her marriage was purely a love match.

To some degree it was. The couple’s mutual fascination is clear in their courtship photos. But within the first months of marriage, the groom and the bride’s father argued over the details of her dowry. Her disillusionment was so severe, the couple separated for five years before I was born. In time, there was a reconciliation, but the wounds were neither healed, nor discussed. My memoir was digging into a decades-long aggrieved silence.

Why write it? Because within the microcosm of our story I could explore the timeless phenomenon of migration, all the human impulses (hope, fear, ambition, survival) involved in the emigration-immigration-assimilation process, which is often a focus in my writing.

But spotlight my loved ones’ most intimate pain?

For almost a year, I tried to not write the memoir. Looking back, I see there were three breakthroughs that allowed me to write to completion.

Breakthrough #1: Follow the dialogue.

To create scenes in fiction, I plop my characters down in a setting (specific place, specific time) and let them talk. In early drafts, I rely on this chitchat to discover my characters’ voices, and unearth their internal and external conflicts. With the memoir, though, I couldn’t just put words in people’s mouths. Part of the nonfiction “contract” is adherence to what is factually true. I’m lucky that many in my family were lively storytellers, and within my notes I found lines of dialogue that amounted to a gold mine.

For example, when my grandmother, at 14½, was “asked for” by a 28-year-old townsman, her reaction was “No!” But her mother told her, “Marry him, he’ll take you to America.” How efficiently that bit of dialogue expressed my immigrant ancestors’ surety that there was salvation in the U.S. They lived in a world of such poverty and powerlessness that the best a mother could do was urge her daughter to marry a stranger who would take her away.

My grandmother did follow my grandfather to a Pittsburgh steel town, and when their only child, my mother, was almost out of high school, they brought her back to their village to meet her intended. As a child of the 1960s suburbs, I balked at “arranged marriage,” so it was reassuring when my mother told me about meeting my dad: “If I didn’t like him, I wouldn’t have had to marry him, but I liked him right away.”

Lovely, romantic! But there was another line that led me deeper into my parents’ story. When I was around 10, I came upon my mother organizing the cedar closet and I glimpsed her wedding dress tucked in back. “Please,” I begged, “can I see it?”

“If I pull that dress out,” she told me through gritted teeth, “I’m going to burn it!” That one line of dialogue gave me the question that guided my work through the whole memoir: How did that happy bride arrive at such disappointment?

Breakthrough #2. Write one draft in disappearing ink.

In fiction, we push our characters to reveal their fullest selves. Their occasional surliness. The flashes of greediness that contradict their usual generosity. In short, we allow them to be human. With memoir, I wasn’t exactly protecting my people, but, unconsciously, I was showing them in their best light, avoiding moments when they were contradictory and unpleasant. Hiding the fights. Also, I wasn’t writing about myself, though I knew a memoir lacks heft if the writer never shows her vulnerability.

In short, I was playing it safe. My pages were flat. And then I made a deal with myself: You can write the full story without ever showing it to another living person. And then I wrote, as if with magic ink. I could read the pages, but no one else ever would.

Breakthrough #3: Is it interesting to the reader or just to you?

My trick worked. Showing my pages to no one—not even my usual readers—I developed my project from inspiration to full draft, from draft to revision. But now, surprising myself, I felt the itch to complete the circle by putting the manuscript in front of a reader. I started small, sent the story to one trusted friend, who was honest enough to give me this invaluable feedback: “There are parts of this memoir that are interesting because they’re interesting, and parts that are interesting because they’re about you. I like those parts, but will the general reader who doesn’t know you?”

Writing about my family, I had blinders. I couldn’t discern where my memoir was connecting with larger themes and where I was indulging in fond family lore. The question Why is this here? became my best editing tool. Events could not be included just because they had “happened in real life.” I tested every section: Was it doing its work to build tension, advance plot, reveal conflict, or offer fresh reflection? In time, I cut my manuscript by a third.

I worked on After Italy for 13 years. My early manuscripts were as haphazard as a family photo album, overstuffed with duplicate or unclear images, hard-to-identify people and backdrops, inaccurate dates. Over time, lines of dialogue led me to scenes, the scenes pushed me to honesty. The craft elements were pulling their weight to create a narrative reaching to be part of a larger discussion. 

Check out Anna Monardo’s After Italy here:

Anna Monardo’s site

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