Novel chosen by the ITALIAN UNESCO COMMISSION for World Book and Copyright Day 2017, to represent the Marche Region.

Lara Isabel is thirty years old, working a job she doesn’t like, many friends and a forbidden love she cannot get over. Dora is eighty-four years old and has a deep wound in her heart, an age-old pain that she has been carrying around for more than half a century. They both live in the historical center of Ancona where, following a chance encounter, their extraordinary friendship was born.
Strange coincidences and sad memories, which lead them to relive history, the air raids that devastated the city during the Second World War. Lara Isabel wants to help Dora at all costs, to overcome the terrible sense of guilt that has always been with her since she lost her cousin Giorgia and her best friend Myriam during an air raid, forced to flee from racial persecution, without having been able to resolve their mutual misunderstandings. Lara Isabel’s investigations lead her to an old and picturesque boarding house, where the attic there holds several mysteries that might finally be unveiled…

Doric Hotel is a metropolitan fairy tale, intimate and emotional, about the values of friendship and the memories of the past, but it is also a coming-of-age story about a young woman who is struggling with her own feelings to forget a difficult love and will gain, almost without even realizing it, more maturity and a balanced self-awareness.

Luisa Mazzocchi holds a degree in law and lives in Ancona, the city where her novels take place. Among her passions, in addition to writing, are theatrical literature and nineteenth-century style balls.