The author, an Anglo-American married to an Italian landowner, found herself raising a family during the civil war and foreign invasion in the remote Tuscan countryside. This diary records her concerns to keep her household and sixty orphans together and save a rural community from annihilation.
A picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di Marco Datini, the 14th-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of the Marchesa Origo's study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figure of the later-Middle Ages.