From Barga
to Britain
Migration, memory and wine — the true-history novels of an Italian family who crossed Europe to make Britain home.
One small Tuscan town. Millions of stories worldwide.
At the close of the nineteenth century, the silk industry of the Serchio valley collapsed. Thousands of Tuscans walked out of the hilltop town of Barga and never came home. Some opened ice-cream parlours in Glasgow's tenements. Some pressed coal in the pits of County Durham. One nineteen-year-old descendant became the youngest soldier of the Second World War to be awarded the Victoria Cross.
Robert Rossi tells their story.
An evening with Robert
Robert is touring two cities whose history was rewritten by Italian hands — Glasgow, where Barghigiani families pioneered Scotland's beloved chip shops and gelaterias, and Newcastle, the gateway to the County Durham mining villages where Dennis Donnini grew up.
Each evening blends storytelling, archive photographs, readings from the trilogy, and a glass of wine from the very valley where the saga begins. Intimate venues. Generous Q&A. Italian warmth.
View All Events →From Barga to Britain
Migration, memory & wine.
From Barga to Britain
A North-East evening on the Donnini family.
Both events sold out within days. Join the mailing list to hear about the next one first.
50,000 names. Maybe yours.
For thirty years, alongside writing the trilogy, Robert has been quietly building a genealogical database of the Barga diaspora — more than fifty thousand named relatives, almost all tied to the same handful of Tuscan villages. If your family came to Britain from anywhere near Barga, the chances are real that you are already in it.
Bring a surname to the next event. Maybe leave with a cousin.
Find your family →It happens at every event
Someone says a surname in the Q&A. Robert recognises it. Within minutes a thread is pulled — a great-uncle's village, a Glasgow wedding, a sibling who didn't emigrate — and a stranger in the audience discovers a third cousin three rows back.
“How was it that I had never heard of Dennis — a young nineteen-year-old, only five foot tall, who possessed the bravery to face the Nazi enemy head on? His family lived little more than thirty minutes from my home in England.” — Robert Rossi
Italian Blood, British Heart
Fredo is a young man in a starving Tuscan village. When his mother reveals a family secret, he packs a suitcase and follows the long road north to Scotland — to a coal town, to harsh winters, and to the slow, stubborn building of a family that will be tested twice over by world war.
Inspired by the true story of Fusilier Dennis Donnini VC — at nineteen, the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross of the Second World War — and by the author's own family's exodus from Barga.
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Both 2026 evenings sold out before public release. If you'd like to be on the early-access list for the next city — and receive Robert's occasional letter on Italian-British history — leave your email below.
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