David D. Downie

David D. Downie (born in San Francisco in 1958) is a multilingual Paris-based American nonfiction author, crime novelist and journalist who writes most often about culture, food and travel.

Biography Downie's family background is revealed in his memoir Shadows of Rome. His father, Charles E. Downie Jr., a Californian from Garden Grove, previously a journalist on the San Francisco Chronicle, served as a G.I. during the Second World War, fighting in the Italian campaign and reaching the Gothic Line. Thanks to her and to his "formidable" grandmother, who eventually migrated to California to be with her daughter but never learned English, David, youngest of six children, can claim Italian literally as both second language and mother tongue.

Downie was "weaned on crime novels and thrillers" and grew up reading Victor Hugo and Dante in old illustrated editions. His love for Rome, his mother's native city, arose from living there briefly in the mid-1960s:

In Berkeley in the late 1960s the reunited Downies "settled into a 1920s mock-Tudor house high upon the rolling hills, our family home for the next quarter century", where, quoting this time Downie's own understatement, "a lively time was had by all". His early and enduring enthusiasm for Paris springs from waiting tables at a Bay Area French restaurant, from volunteering as an usher at the San Francisco Opera where he saw Puccini's La Bohême, and from a first visit to the city in 1976.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Downie took a master's degree in Italian from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, According to classicist and art historian Andrew Riggsby, in Paris to the Pyrenees Downie turned a story of self-discovery into an exploration of time and place. In this image of France "layers of the past are stacked and patched and run together: Caesar and his legions confronting Vercingétorix ... Roland and Charlemagne ... Viollet-le-Duc’s theme-park-ish restorations ... the Resistance to the Nazis, and even the travels of an earlier, more gluttonous, and less reflective David Downie". Anthony Sattin, another writer who combines travel with history, considers that in Downie's case the act of walking with the photographer Alison, the pleasures of the countryside, "the lighting out for the territory when one is a certain age", give this book its reason. The walk ("which he completed on foot between the titular locations", according to Gilbert Taylor's risky claim in Booklist) was in reality anything but complete when Downie, "an amiable companion, questioning and willing, and flawed", found that "a damaged back and aching knees force him to stop just outside Mâcon", a long way from the Pyrenees and much further still from Compostela. For his first food book, Cooking the Roman Way, "when I had doubts about classic Roman recipes ... I asked my mother," he admitted. "She taught me the basics of cooking as soon as I grew tall enough to stir the pot of bubbling garofolato (beef stew)" for Tuesday dinner, whose leftovers would become pasta sauce for the Wednesday spaghetti feed. The uninhibited conviviality of Roman meals was what made the eating experience so pleasant, he advised the reader: this conviviality was "the hidden ingredient in all the recipes". "Perhaps Downie takes food a bit too seriously," Miranda Seymour reflected in praising A Taste of Paris in the New York Times Book Review. She quotes him as he savours a Parisian supper: "How delicious my appealingly plated but very old-fashioned roast pork loin with mustard sauce à l'ancienne. How polite and professional the service. How affordable the more than potable Château Haut-Musset Lalande-de-Pomerol." Downie scarcely disputes it. Earlier, preparing for the Way of Saint James, he had admitted to "a quarter century of high living as a travel and food writer", to "the recipes I'd tested, the buttery croissants and fluffy mousses I'd savored", to calvados, cognac, and even "Inspector Maigret's Vieille Prune, a lethal eau de vie distilled from plums". This story of literary suspense is built on "deeply disturbing observations of contemporary American culture".

Downie's fascination with left/right politics is an undercurrent in his series of "Daria Vinci Investigations". In the first, Red Riviera (published 2021), Commissioner Vinci of the Italian crime investigation service DIGOS unravels the gruesome murder of a 92-year-old Italian-American former CIA operative. The heroine, a karate expert and "plagued by the constant need to question received wisdom" like the author, is supported by two contrasting characters, her sidekick Osvaldo Morbido and her 92-year-old godfather Willem Bremach, but she is almost defeated by the Neo-Fascist local questor (chief of police). Genoa and the surrounding Cinque Terre are compellingly evoked, and Downie claims to have predicted, in an episode involving seabed exploration, the location of a Roman shipwreck that would actually be discovered a year later in the Gulf of Portofino. Conveniently Bremach and Morbido are at hand again; in Rome, once again, there is a questor who wants her off the case.

Right-wing politics in the United States becomes an insistent theme in Downie's Clear, Cool, Sweet Water (2026), though the novel is set entirely in Europe. The disappearance of Robert, an ageing U.S. expatriate, long settled in eastern France, appears at first to result from ambitious hiking in a forested, swampy landscape. Instead he has travelled incognito to Italy, attempting to re-attract his estranged wife, Laure, while dodging his murderous nephew, the ferrety-faced hacker Luke, who is armed with a drone as well as firearms (a reviewer sees "dark shadows of Ukraine and Iran"). The enmity results from Robert's quarrel with his brother, Luke's father, who now leads an evangelical church in California with extreme conservative leanings. Laure, Robert and Luke are followed in alternate chapters towards a climax in Monterosso al Mare in Liguria: Robert and Laure are reunited at the spot where they first fell in love, while Luke is trapped by Italian bureaucracy, the only force able to stand against the powers that threaten the world. The book's title is the opening line of a famous sonnet by Petrarch: "Chiare, fresche e dolci acque". His first non-fiction book in English, Enchanted Liguria appeared in 1997. It was translated the following year in Italy under the title La Liguria incantata. His book Paris, Paris (first edition 2005) explores the sites of Paris, from the Ile Saint-Louis to Les Halles and the parks of Montsouris and Buttes Chaumont. Paris, Paris includes insights on Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand and Coco Chanel. The book was reissued in April 2011 as part of the Armchair Traveler series at Broadway Books (Random House), now including a new chapter (titled "Hit the Road Jacques") on the Way of Saint James in Paris. Meanwhile, he had been invited to translate Jean-Christophe Napias's Quiet Corners of Paris (The Little Bookroom, 2007), which in turn led him to write Quiet Corners of Rome for the same publisher: this appeared in 2011.

His work is full of historical insights, although, as Margaret Quamme carefully warned librarians when recommending A Taste of Paris (2017), he "may not be temperamentally suited for writing a strictly chronological history". When researching A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light (2015) he was walking in the footsteps of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. In this exploration of Paris in the 19th century heyday of Romanticism, less-known figures aroused his special enthusiasm: Félix Nadar, pioneer photographer and impractical dreamer, and Henri Murger, sickly author of Scènes de la vie de Bohème which was transformed into Puccini's La Bohême. He recalled that Le Marais was once both royal and bohemian, and dominated by Victor Hugo; that the Montmartre of the Romantics was a grassy hill, with goat herds and real windmills, and its artists’ studios were vast, light and cheap.

His illustrated book on the contemporary cuisine of Rome, Cooking the Roman Way, was listed among the top ten cookbooks of 2002 by the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle. The book is full of anecdotes about the names, hidden meanings and origins of Italian foods; useful notes explain the difference between farro and spelt and the nature and use of the quinto quarto ("fifth quarter") of butchered animals. Among his food- and wine-related books are three volumes in the Terroir Guides series, published by The Little Bookroom, and dedicated to the food and wine of the Italian Riviera (and Genoa), Rome and Burgundy.

"The fall is the best time to eat in France," Downie reported in autumn 2017 as A Taste of Paris was published, "everyone knows that. It's when everything comes in. It's the harvest season." As he recognised, French food awareness has an elitist side: "The reason Paris has great food in modern times is because of money ... All the best stuff gets rushed to Paris because this is the best market. There are rich families and demanding eaters here." A Taste of Paris begins with the food of Roman Paris, continues through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, "enlarges on the gourmand seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" to reach the present day, but "each historical episode is at the same time an exploration of some Parisian neighbourhood" from its origins to its modern food landmarks.

Journalism and autobiography Downie's articles have appeared in about 50 publications, print and online, including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Gastronomica, The Art of Eating, Australian Financial Review, Salon.com, Epicurious.com and Concierge.com. He has acted as Paris correspondent, contributing editor or European editor for a number of publications, including Appellation, Art & Antiques and Departures. His writing has also appeared in anthologies, among them The Collected Traveler volumes on Paris, Southwest France and Central Italy.

His memoir Shadows of Rome (Seine, Tiber & Bay, 2025) relies on his own memory and on that of his parents and grandparents, admittedly not always reliable. He has spent time "investigating the story of my mother's eccentric parents and brothers ... and many other quirky members of the Downie and Anzi tribes". Major figures are his father, "a dispassionate American", his mother, "an extroverted Roman teen", her father Alessandro Anzi who "deserves a book on his own", and, not least, the "gallery of friends and family she collected in California". 2019 : The Gardener of Eden (Pegasus Books) 2021 : Red Riviera: a Daria Vinci investigation (Alan Squire Publishing) 2022 : Roman Roulette: a Daria Vinci investigation (Alan Squire Publishing) 2022 : Four of Clubs: Murder in the High Sierra (Seine, Tiber & Bay) 2023 : The Paris, Paris Timeline (Seine, Tiber & Bay) 2025 : Shadows of Rome: a memoir (Seine, Tiber & Bay) 2026 : Clear, Cool, Sweet Water (Seine, Tiber & Bay)

As translator 2007 : Jean-Christophe Napias, Quiet Corners of Paris (The Little Bookroom)

Selected articles 1999 : "Renzo Piano, Agent Provocateur" in San Francisco Chronicle: SFGate (16 May) 2003 : "A Roman Anchovy's Tale" in Gastronomica vol. 3 pp. 25–28 JSTOR 2003 : "Buried Treasure" in Los Angeles Times (8 June) 2010 : "Letter from Rome: The view from the Janus Hill, or how some Romans think of Rome" at Gadling (4 August) 2011 : "Chartres Keeps Its Spiritual Allure" in San Francisco Chronicle: SFGate (10 July) 2011 : "Walking on the Wild Side of Paris" at Gadling (22 November) 2012 : "In the Shadow of Cinque Terre: discovering the treasures of La Spezia" at Gadling (28 December) 2013 : "David's Discoveries: The beetle-loving calligrapher of Paris" at Gadling (30 June)