{"id":1008,"date":"2026-01-05T15:15:35","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/?p=1008"},"modified":"2026-01-05T15:15:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:15:39","slug":"interview-with-author-flavia-brunetti-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/05\/interview-with-author-flavia-brunetti-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Author Flavia Brunetti (English)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Charlotte Cicero. Published in Open Doors Issue N. 7 June 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In honor of the 2025 Florence Literary Society Publishing Day<\/a>, Open Doors will be publishing a series of interviews during the course of 2025 with authors on just how they went from manu- script to publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open Doors intern Charlotte Cicero sat down with Rome-based author Flavia Brunetti to discuss her path to publishing and her new book The Web of Time. This interview took place on Instagram Live, you can watch it on our instagram page: @opendoorsreview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Photo credit: Haizea Mariti<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hello everyone! Welcome – my name is Charlotte Cicero, I\u2019m currently studying abroad here and Florence and working as an intern with Open Doors \u2014I\u2019m so excited to host this interview live with our special guest today and can\u2019t wait to get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s event is part of our 2025 series of interviews based on publishing \u2014this is in celebration of the upcoming \u201cPublishing Day\u201d created by the Florence Literary Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our first interview was with Tiffany Parks in our last issue, and this interview will be featured in Open Doors\u2019 upcoming issue, which you will all get to see this May!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So now introducing our special guest today…. Flavia Brunetti was the 1st guest judge of Open Doors Review in 2020 and the author of All the Way to Italy<\/em> Flavia\u2019s NEW book, The Web of Time <\/em>which is published by Blue House Literary, comes out on May 20th and is available for pre-order now! Plus, Open Doors will be publishing a chapter in our upcoming issue! Flavia, welcome and hello!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we start here is a quick synopsis of this book, which I am SO excited to read:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cProtected by the gods and powering the three Great Portals of Kindness, Art, and Language, The Web of Time <\/em>rearranges itself as humans change their minds, fall in love, or cause empires to rise and fall. When the Great Portals close from the world, time begins erasing itself, histories start to disappear, earth falls into chaos, and the gods don\u2019t know how to stop it\u2014until Jack meets Anna. Anna is a passionate and solitary writer who is protected by her companion, Nafusa of Libya, the cat god. When Jack, a young painter harboring a traumatic past, falls through the Great Portal of Art in Tunis, he stumbles into Anna and his fate. Helped… and hindered by a rotating cast of deities, the two embark on a journey that connects three an- cient cities in different times: Rome, Tunis, and Tripoli. They realize that it is Anna\u2019s gift for healing words and Jack\u2019s natural talent for drawing places as they were, that can reinstate the Great Portals and restore the world\u2019s balance…. but some of the darker gods who thrive on chaos will stop at nothing to derail their quest. As time tears faster than they can heal it, Anna and Jack must come together in time to save history, and the possibility of a future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>How do you fit in a writing schedule around your work life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>Oh we\u2019re gonna start with the hard questions… I think it\u2019s one that we all struggle with regardless of what walks of life we\u2019re in or what other jobs or things we do in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can be a challenge no matter what. And for the record I don\u2019t always get this right, it\u2019s not me and my high horse… what has helped me so far has been I think, compartmentalizing. I try to be as present as possible in whatever I\u2019m doing at the moment, it\u2019s been serving me really well. Sometimes we can feel like our attention is being pulled in a million different directions. If I\u2019m working, I try to be there in that moment. I\u2019m better off if I leave an hour in the morning to just write, so I leave my- self time to do just that. I think it all feeds into the writing element. So I try to leave time for things like taking a walk \u2013 that really helps me if I have writer\u2019s block, time to rest, and spend with friends, and I also have to-do lists that are a mile long. And I\u2019ve learned that If I do one or two if I check them off, I consider it a victory. What\u2019s helped in the balance of it is leaving time for certain things, making sure that I\u2019m present, and not giving myself such a hard time. I\u2019ve seen this a lot, especially with the women in my life we give ourselves a really hard time when we\u2019re doing so many things, to take stock of the victo- ries. I think it\u2019s important to see everything as a victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>Absolutely! A per- spective that came to mind as you were talking about that is\u2014if you looked at all the things you accomplished in a day completely separate from your to-do list you made in the morning, you\u2019d say, \u201coh my gosh I really did get a lot done today\u201d\u2014rather than think- ing about all the things you didn\u2019t get done. How is The Web of Time <\/em>different from your other works?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>It was a completely different genre, my first young adult and my first fantasy book, my first book All the Way to Italy <\/em>was also fiction… it wasn\u2019t fantasy, but a piece of the idea for The Web of Time <\/em>came out while I was writing All the Way to Ita- ly<\/em>\u2014I really wanted to personify some of the parts that were really important. And so I knew I wanted to write a fantasy, which All the Way to Italy <\/em>isn\u2019t, so that\u2019s how it\u2019s different… but it also stems from my previous work. I also write shorter pieces, one of which Open Doors published, which is a little easter egg to The Web of Time<\/em>. It\u2019s different in the way it expresses itself, it\u2019s a longer form of writing. It has elements that creep into all of my work, Rome first and foremost, but then a series of other things, grief, hope, and loss, finding ourselves again, and all of the different cultures we all encompass. We all bring all of the places that we\u2019ve been to the things that we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>I love that, that\u2019s amazing. What research did you do for this novel, pre- paring to write it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>So the research element was substantial for Web of Time <\/em>but really fun. The idea for it came from my travels and what I really do, so Rome and Tunis, and Tripoli, are all cities I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in. Tunis and Rome I\u2019ve lived in, Tripoli I haven\u2019t had the privilege of living in yet, but I spent a lot of time there, so a lot of my ideas came from these different places. I also really wanted to add\u2014that as the story fleshed itself out\u2014it was important for me to be historically accurate. I think probably be- cause also I hang out with a lot of tour guides, and I think everybody would have been upset had I just taken creative liberties, historically speaking. I think that you can take liberties with history, but you have to be purposeful about it. So a lot of the research I did revolved around the historical pieces that are in the book and to make sure that what I was saying was historically accurate\u2014there are pieces that are in dif- ferent parts of the cities; obviously Jack and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna spend a lot of time engaging in and
around those places, and I really wanted it
to be true. I think that was a lot of the re-
search element, a lot of ancient Rome, they
go back through time so a lot of the story
takes place in different areas that needed to
place themselves in a historically accurate
way. A lot of the myths surround the differ-
ent cities, and I had a lot of fun when I was
creating this \u2018pantheon of gods\u2019. Some of
them I made up, ones I knew I wanted to be
gods of places, but some of them come from
history, so I needed those to be named. I
got to do a lot of background research, the
different types of gods and the different cultures that call them, it opens up a whole world, which is really very cool, and that\u2019s the privilege of getting to be in cities like Rome, Tunis, Tripoli, that are so strongly located in history, but in a way that they have brought into modern times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>I am also from Northern California, so reading your profile I\u2019m so in- terested to know how you take elements from all the places you\u2019ve lived into your writing style, specifically your lived experiences in Rome, Tunis, and California, and how they differ or are similar?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>So it\u2019s really good to hear you\u2019re also from Northern California, I spent be- tween the ages of 3 and 19 there. So I used to feel very American. My lived experi- ences have very much colored The Web of Time <\/em>and All the Way To Italy<\/em>. I think the Web of Time <\/em>comes from the lived experiences of Rome, a city that I carry with me all the time, no matter where I go. Tunis was a city that when I first went, it felt su- per alien, like nothing I\u2019d ever seen before, except it was strange because it was only 45 minutes from Rome by plane, but then it slowly became home. The same thing happened in Tripoli, the more time I spent there and with the people there…also ev- eryone loves Italians, everyone\u2019s always happy to talk to you about the food that they have that\u2019s similar or different, the languages, and I think one of the first times I was comfortable in Libya was when one of my colleagues heard me speaking in Italian over the phone and said \u201cyou know in Libyan, I recognize some of the words, we use Italian slang\u201d so we started talking about how these things are similar and how they are different, actually that\u2019s where the idea for the portals came. The three portals are kindness, art, and language. My lived experience has been that those are the things that connect us. That\u2019s when you start to realize that the things that bring us together are so much stronger than anything that could try to tear us apart. And with Tunisia, I spent 4 years living there, it\u2019s firmly ensconced in my heart, so is Libya, very much so and I had this fascination with Libya with the Nafusa mountains and so of course one of the gods, that\u2019s one of the main characters in The Web of Time <\/em>is Nafusa and he\u2019s a god of the Libyan mountain range. A lot of the settings of The Web of Time <\/em>are set in areas of Tunis that I lived in, some of them are set in a place that one of my best friends is from, who I based one of the goddesses on, and then of course Rome. Rome colors everything I do. I think I\u2019ll always write about about Rome, whether it\u2019s fantastical or not, she\u2019s in everything I do. I think that\u2019s always going to be the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>I love that, Rome is so beautiful. I\u2019ve only been twice, but Rome is like one of those places that you are just in and you\u2019re like, \u201cwoah\u201d. You\u2019ve lived in Tunisia as well, which is featured in your book – are there any other nuances and little memories from living there that can be seen in this book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>So many! I\u2019ve peppered The Web of Time <\/em>with the places that I really left my heart in in Tunisia. Where Jack\u2019s father lives, is called La Marsa, it\u2019s where I lived when I was there, I lived right by the sea, and so those four years for me are colored with the sounds and colors of the sea. Living there, I could literally see the Mediter- ranean from my kitchen window. I got to see the sea in all of its moods. This is how Dora is, the Goddess of the Mediterranean; and she is very much like her water, she is incredibly kind and devoted, but at the same time, if you make her angry, she be- comes like an ocean. So I think that is something I took with me and brought into The Web of Time<\/em>, there\u2019s a point where Jack is walking between La Marsa and Sidi Bou Said which is a very famous area of Tunis, and those are walks that I used to go on with my friends and my colleagues. Every time someone would come to visit me in Tunis, that\u2019s where I would take them. There are places that really stay with you. The locations of the books – the Ennejma Ezzahra is a really important place in The Web of Time <\/em>and it\u2019s a palace that is in Tunisia. It\u2019s part of the reason why, and my publisher likes to say, it\u2019s a really good book for \u2018armchair traveling\u2019. All of the places are places you can feasibly visit. Areas of Rome, different places in Tunisia, and Libya can be less so, it\u2019s not always as open to tourists. But sometimes it is, I hope that it can remain a stable context and we can go visit it more. One of the things I saw when I was in Tripoli, they have Roman ruins that are completely untouched, because there\u2019s not as much tourism there. And there are just these incredible pieces of history. Like the arch of Marcus Aurelius in Tripoli, that\u2019s also one of the main places in the book. It\u2019s another connection between all of our histories, it\u2019s another way we\u2019re all coming from, we all have shared experiences, cultural cross-polli- nation is something you see every- where you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>I love that phrase \u201ccul- tural cross-pollination\u201d… just the way you described that all makes me want to go \u2018armchair traveling\u2019 as you mentioned. Is there anything you took from your novel, All the Way to Italy <\/em>that you brought into The Web of Time<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>I think the first example that
comes to mind, there is Sira who is
a main character in All the Way to
Italy <\/em>and she is the personification
of my aunt. My aunt raised me, she
was the most important person in
my life, and Cira is a different character in The Web of Time<\/em>. She is the most power- ful goddess in Rome, in the end, the city is hers. That is because in everything that I write I will always bring my aunt and my family into it. I brought her into The Web of Time <\/em>as a goddess of Rome because that\u2019s what she was. She, and my other aunt, were the first ones to encourage my being a writer. She supported me hugely. That\u2019s the gift that they gave me, so everything I write is sort of an ode to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>Talking about your publishing journey, can you walk me through what it was like getting your publisher for The Web of Time<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>So many of the people that I speak to, my fellow writers, struggle with a sim- ilar adventure of finding what we want to do with our lives. I am a big advocate that nowadays there are so many things you can really do. I ultimately wanted to go with a small, independent press. The reason I wanted to do that, was that I really wanted someone who believed in the book the same way I believed in it. Someone who would be able to spend time on it, but something where I got to be a part of the process. I really wanted a back and forth, where we would exchange thoughts. I say this always, it\u2019s a give and take. It took a really long time, any form of traditional publishing is just kind of a long game. I really wanted to make sure The Web of Time <\/em>found the right home. When Blue House came around, it was the right fit and it has been. The big takeaway for me is to trust your gut. I say this as someone who struggles with fear all the time, if something doesn\u2019t feel right, don\u2019t settle if it\u2019s your dream. If it\u2019s something that you really want to go a certain way, that doesn\u2019t mean it has to be the original way you planned it. It is worth it. It\u2019s almost like a relationship. If you\u2019re in a relationship and it\u2019s not the right fit, you know it\u2019s not the right fit. And there is the right fit out there. And if you don\u2019t let go of what\u2019s not right for you, then what is right for you doesn\u2019t have the opportunity to come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>Yes! I heard a quote the other day that was just like this…. \u201cYou can\u2019t re- lease what doesn\u2019t serve you until you realize it doesn\u2019t serve you\u201d. I think that\u2019s very similar to what you were talking about. I\u2019m excited to see those values in your book, and relate them to our own lives. People are going to feel so much and really take a lot away from your writing. This will be our last question of the evening, What\u2019s some- thing that\u2019s a deal breaker for you when looking for publishers or agents and what\u2019s something that stands out for you as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: I think this can change according to what you want, but if you\u2019re at least clear on what you don\u2019t want, that can help you find the right fit. Like we were saying be- fore, for me it was really important to have a publisher that felt like a collaborative process. I wanted to be a part of the cover, and the summaries, I wanted to be heard. But at the same time, I recognize how important it also was that I listened. Because they are the experts, there\u2019s a give and take, like in a good relationship! You know, The Web of Time <\/em>is my baby, in the same way whenever we write something, it\u2019s our baby. When you hear suggestions sometimes, immediately you\u2019re like \u201cNo no no this is my baby\u201d … but you do really have to hear what they are saying. You have to be editable. I think there\u2019s just a line, and for me, it was really important to find a publisher where that line was respected. This means you come to me and you say \u201cListen, there\u2019s this piece what do you think, can we adjust or remove?\u201d and I make the commitment to say \u201cOkay I hear you and I\u2019ll think about it\u201d and if I want to, I make that change or you express that \u201cit\u2019s really important to me that this stays this way\u201d and you find a common ground. Blue House is like that. They don\u2019t tell you what to do, they come with suggestions. We\u2019re all editable, and we can all be better writers and better cre- ators, but sometimes you have to protect your characters. It really depends on what you want; it\u2019s good to be clear about what you want, maybe even more about what you don\u2019t want. The thing that would take me away from a publisher, is if they don\u2019t hear you. This is a really competitive field, and there are so many publishers that aren\u2019t necessarily professional. It can be really hard for a writer to stand their ground. For that, my community has been really useful. I have an incredible editor, who I\u2019ve been able to go to throughout this process and say \u201cI feel this way about this, what do you think?\u201d and I think having those people in your life is really important because you need people in your life that are calling you out when you need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>Absolutely – well that was our last question, anything you would like to add?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flavia: <\/strong>Yes!\u2014the book is available for pre-order, I\u2019m doing an incredible partnership with this language school Natakalam, and they are offering a 15% coupon for their language courses, all their teachers are from conflict-affected communities. We are having a launch on May 29th, which will be a free event! We\u2019ll talk and go more into this topic of \u201ccross-cultural pollination\u201d and do a reading from the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte: <\/strong>Well Flavia thank you so much for letting me pick your brain, I can\u2019t wait to read The Web of Time<\/em>, and thank you all so much for joining us today\u2014again The Web of Time <\/em>comes out on May 20th and is available for pre-order now! Flavia thank you for being here!<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Read an excerpt of The Web of Time on page 52: \u201cThe Great Portal of Art.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Charlotte Cicero. Published in Open Doors Issue N. 7 June 2025. In honor of the 2025 Florence Literary Society Publishing Day, Open Doors will be publishing a series of interviews during the course of 2025 with authors on just how they went from manu- script to publication. Open Doors intern Charlotte Cicero sat down with Rome-based author Flavia Brunetti to discuss her path to publishing and her new book The Web of Time. This interview took place on Instagram Live, you can watch it on our instagram page: @opendoorsreview. Photo credit: Haizea Mariti Hello everyone! Welcome – my name is Charlotte Cicero, I\u2019m currently studying abroad here and Florence and working as an intern with Open Doors \u2014I\u2019m so excited to host this interview live with our special guest today and can\u2019t wait to get started! Today\u2019s event is part of our 2025 series of interviews based on publishing \u2014this is in celebration of the upcoming \u201cPublishing Day\u201d created by the Florence Literary Society. Our first interview was with Tiffany Parks in our last issue, and this interview will be featured in Open Doors\u2019 upcoming issue, which you will all get to see this May! So now introducing our special guest today…. Flavia Brunetti was the 1st guest judge of Open Doors Review in 2020 and the author of All the Way to Italy Flavia\u2019s NEW book, The Web of Time which is published by Blue House Literary, comes out on May 20th and is available for pre-order now! Plus, Open Doors will be publishing a chapter in our upcoming issue! Flavia, welcome and hello! Before we start here is a quick synopsis of this book, which I am SO excited to read: \u201cProtected by the gods and powering the three Great Portals of Kindness, Art, and Language, The Web of Time rearranges itself as humans change their minds, fall in love, or cause empires to rise and fall. When the Great Portals close from the world, time begins erasing itself, histories start to disappear, earth falls into chaos, and the gods don\u2019t know how to stop it\u2014until Jack meets Anna. Anna is a passionate and solitary writer who is protected by her companion, Nafusa of Libya, the cat god. When Jack, a young painter harboring a traumatic past, falls through the Great Portal of Art in Tunis, he stumbles into Anna and his fate. Helped… and hindered by a rotating cast of deities, the two embark on a journey that connects three an- cient cities in different times: Rome, Tunis, and Tripoli. They realize that it is Anna\u2019s gift for healing words and Jack\u2019s natural talent for drawing places as they were, that can reinstate the Great Portals and restore the world\u2019s balance…. but some of the darker gods who thrive on chaos will stop at nothing to derail their quest. As time tears faster than they can heal it, Anna and Jack must come together in time to save history, and the possibility of a future.\u201d Charlotte: How do you fit in a writing schedule around your work life? Flavia: Oh we\u2019re gonna start with the hard questions… I think it\u2019s one that we all struggle with regardless of what walks of life we\u2019re in or what other jobs or things we do in general. This can be a challenge no matter what. And for the record I don\u2019t always get this right, it\u2019s not me and my high horse… what has helped me so far has been I think, compartmentalizing. I try to be as present as possible in whatever I\u2019m doing at the moment, it\u2019s been serving me really well. Sometimes we can feel like our attention is being pulled in a million different directions. If I\u2019m working, I try to be there in that moment. I\u2019m better off if I leave an hour in the morning to just write, so I leave my- self time to do just that. I think it all feeds into the writing element. So I try to leave time for things like taking a walk \u2013 that really helps me if I have writer\u2019s block, time to rest, and spend with friends, and I also have to-do lists that are a mile long. And I\u2019ve learned that If I do one or two if I check them off, I consider it a victory. What\u2019s helped in the balance of it is leaving time for certain things, making sure that I\u2019m present, and not giving myself such a hard time. I\u2019ve seen this a lot, especially with the women in my life we give ourselves a really hard time when we\u2019re doing so many things, to take stock of the victo- ries. I think it\u2019s important to see everything as a victory. Charlotte: Absolutely! A per- spective that came to mind as you were talking about that is\u2014if you looked at all the things you accomplished in a day completely separate from your to-do list you made in the morning, you\u2019d say, \u201coh my gosh I really did get a lot done today\u201d\u2014rather than think- ing about all the things you didn\u2019t get done. How is The Web of Time different from your other works? Flavia: It was a completely different genre, my first young adult and my first fantasy book, my first book All the Way to Italy was also fiction… it wasn\u2019t fantasy, but a piece of the idea for The Web of Time came out while I was writing All the Way to Ita- ly\u2014I really wanted to personify some of the parts that were really important. And so I knew I wanted to write a fantasy, which All the Way to Italy isn\u2019t, so that\u2019s how it\u2019s different… but it also stems from my previous work. I also write shorter pieces, one of which Open Doors published, which is a little easter egg to The Web of Time. It\u2019s different in the way it expresses itself, it\u2019s a longer form of writing. It has elements that creep into all of my work, Rome first and foremost, but then a series of other things, grief, hope, and loss, finding ourselves again, and all of the different cultures we all encompass. We all bring all of the places that we\u2019ve been to the things that we do. Charlotte: I love that, that\u2019s amazing. What research did you do for this novel, pre- paring to write it? Flavia: So the research element was substantial for Web of Time but really fun. The idea for it came from my travels and what I really do, so Rome and Tunis, and Tripoli, are all cities I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in. Tunis and Rome I\u2019ve lived in, Tripoli I haven\u2019t had the privilege of living in yet, but I spent a lot of time there, so a lot of my ideas came from these different places. I also really wanted to add\u2014that as the story fleshed itself out\u2014it was important for me to be historically accurate. I think probably be- cause also I hang out with a lot of tour guides, and I think everybody would have been upset had I just taken creative liberties, historically speaking. I think that you can take liberties with history, but you have to be purposeful about it. So a lot of the research I did revolved around the historical pieces that are in the book and to make sure that what I was saying was historically accurate\u2014there are pieces that are in dif- ferent parts of the cities; obviously Jack and Anna spend a lot of time engaging in andaround those places, and I really wanted itto be true. I think that was a lot of the re-search element, a lot of ancient Rome, theygo back through time so a lot of the storytakes place in different areas that needed toplace themselves in a historically accurateway. A lot of the myths surround the differ-ent cities, and I had a lot of fun when I wascreating this \u2018pantheon of gods\u2019. Some ofthem I made up, ones I knew I wanted to begods of places, but some of them come fromhistory, so I needed those to be named. Igot to do a lot of background research, thedifferent types of gods and the different cultures that call them, it opens up a whole world, which is really very cool, and that\u2019s the privilege of getting to be in cities like Rome, Tunis, Tripoli, that are so strongly located in history, but in a way that they have brought into modern times. Charlotte: I am also from Northern California, so reading your profile I\u2019m so in- terested to know how you take elements from all the places you\u2019ve lived into your writing style, specifically your lived experiences in Rome, Tunis, and California, and how they differ or are similar? Flavia: So it\u2019s really good to hear you\u2019re also from Northern California, I spent be- tween the ages of 3 and 19 there. So I used to feel very American. My lived experi- ences have very much colored The Web of Time and All the Way To Italy. I think the Web of Time comes from the lived experiences of Rome, a city that I carry with me all the time, no matter where I go. Tunis was a city that when I first went, it felt su- per alien, like nothing I\u2019d ever seen before, except it was strange because it was only 45 minutes from Rome by plane, but then it slowly became home. The same thing happened in Tripoli, the more time I spent there and with the people there…also ev- eryone loves Italians, everyone\u2019s always happy to talk to you about the food that they have that\u2019s similar or different, the languages, and I think one of the first times I was comfortable in Libya was when one of my colleagues heard me speaking in Italian over the phone and said \u201cyou know in Libyan, I recognize some of the words, we use Italian slang\u201d so we started talking about how these things are similar and how they are different, actually that\u2019s where the idea for the portals came. The three portals are kindness, art, and language. My lived experience has been that those are the things that connect us. That\u2019s when you start to realize that the things that bring us together are so much stronger than anything that could try to tear us apart. And with Tunisia, I spent 4 years living there, it\u2019s firmly ensconced in my heart, so is Libya, very much so and I had this fascination with Libya with the Nafusa mountains and so of course one of the gods, that\u2019s one of the main characters in The Web of Time is Nafusa and he\u2019s a god of the Libyan mountain range. A lot of the settings of The Web of Time are set in areas of Tunis that I lived in, some of them are set in a place that one of my best friends is from, who I based one of the goddesses on, and then of course Rome. Rome colors everything I do. I think I\u2019ll always write about about Rome, whether it\u2019s fantastical or not, she\u2019s in everything I do. I think that\u2019s always going to be the case. Charlotte: I love that, Rome is so beautiful. I\u2019ve only been twice, but Rome is like one of those places that you are just in and you\u2019re like, \u201cwoah\u201d. You\u2019ve lived in Tunisia as well, which is featured in your book – are there any other nuances and little memories from living there that can be seen in this book? Flavia: So many! I\u2019ve peppered The Web of Time with the places that I really left my heart in in Tunisia. Where Jack\u2019s father lives, is called La Marsa, it\u2019s where I lived when I was there, I lived right by the sea, and so those four years for me are colored with the sounds…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-interviews","category-english-language"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoorsreview.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}