Nardi has always been attracted to mysteries, conspiracy theories and detective stories. Aside from stimulating her imagination and driving her to uncover the criminals, it is the intrigue that makes reading mysteries fun. She adores reading a story that keeps her guessing. As a writer, though, she speaks of our dark side. “I know each of us has a dark side,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.
“What makes people good or bad?” she asks. Then she answers her own question. “Every human being has a dark side; some have more of a dark side than others.” She confesses that when she writes a thriller, the two sides, good and bad, speak to her, but in the end good always triumphs over evil, and that gives her great satisfaction.
If Nardi’s latest novel seems like a monumental accomplishment, it is one in a long string of literary adventures. She began reading novels at a very early age and recalls being an early fan of Alfred Hitchcock. It is not unusual for writers to show an early propensity to fall in love with the written word. However, in Nardi’s case, she wrote her first novel at the tender age of eight, and as fate would have it, this very first novel was a thriller with a plot encompassing hair-raising twists and turns, delving into clonation and a missing third twin. Many years later, Nardi was pleasantly surprised to see a similar plot in a thriller written by the Welsh mystery writer Ken Follet. She knew then that she had possessed a certain flair for the page-turning genre. Inasmuch as writing came easily to her, she continued to write short stories for three years after her debut novel. Then one day she just stopped writing.
Nardi’s education was, in large part, guided by her love of learning. She describes herself as an early bloomer and a woman in possession of a steely will. At the age of three and a half, she “forced” her mother to teach her how to read and write. She describes her first letters as funny looking but still clearly understandable. In Europe, Nardi had access to many types of high schools. She chose a science track that eventually led to a master’s degree in Computer Science. She developed many skills for twenty-two years, especially in workflow management and working with digital images. She was project manager with banks and insurance companies. At one point, she worked in Italy’s IBM headquarters, close to Milan.
Nardi is a bit circumspect about the lapse in time from when she stopped writing in childhood only to pick it up again with fiery passion much later in life. She said, “I quit writing and did not start again until after my father’s death. Since then I never quit again.” Her father passed away in 2005. His death marked a turning point in her own life. The relationship she had with her father was very close, almost uncanny because she resembled him so strongly. She describes her own face as a photocopy of her father’s face. They had many things in common, but the love of travel, culture and history weaves all threads together into a single knot that defines what they passionately love about life, and especially what they love most about life in Italy.
A short time after her father passed, she saw an announcement for a national contest calling for entries—short novels set in medieval Italy. She had to start all over again, getting into the discipline and mindset of a writer. She had to pull out everything from her heart and soul. Her story was based on one of the many episodes in Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia). She turned a story originally conceived by Dante into a thriller set in a medieval village and won the contest.