Brandon . . .was working as a journalist and arts editor [under her maiden name, Ann Eustice] with The Daily American newspaper in Rome in the 1980s when she fell in love with Italian art. Twenty years later, after stints at other papers and at United Press International in Washington, D.C., she’s still in love and still fluent in Italian. She spends part of each year in Italy.

“All these pieces [in Artful Italy] are overwhelming,” she said, referring to her chosen artwork. “They’re operatic; there’s a great deal of stimulus.”

Her love of painting began in childhood, in Chicago and in Philadelphia. Her parents were art patrons. Brandon grew up in houses where artists’ original works were displayed on the walls. She loved museums and thought of certain paintings as friends. When the family moved from Philadelphia to the countryside, she took the train into the city each weekend to visit her favorite paintings.

“I especially liked Rubens’ Prometheus Bound, where golden eagles tore out his liver, and Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase,” she recalled.

She bonded with the magic of Italian art while she was a college student at Temple University and when she spent six months in Rome as an exchange student at Tyler School of Art. After graduation, she returned to Rome. She has been returning to Italy, and viewing and reading about Italian art, ever since.

Brandon works as a freelance writer and editor. In addition to her own writing, which includes a just-completed biography of Richard Wagner, now “resting in a drawer,” and her present project, a travel guide to New England food, she is editing Franco and Gwen Romagnoli’s upcoming book on traveling and eating in Italy [for Invisible Cities Press]. (Feb. 23, 2002)