My mother, Clare Royce Spaventa, who has died aged 87, was an economist who worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome and then as a researcher at Cambridge University. When marriage led to a new life in Italy, she chose to focus less on her promising career for the benefit of her family.
Fiercely intelligent, Clare was one of the few women of her generation to be admitted to Cambridge, where she read economics (1952-55). She went on to Stanford, then to work for the FAO in Rome around 1958, before returning to Cambridge as a researcher. It is during this second time there that, through Amartya Sen, she met Luigi Spaventa, also an economist. They decided to get married in great haste, in 1962 – there was no internet then, and phoning and travelling were extraordinarily expensive.
But getting married meant moving to Rome and getting used to what was then a rather closed society. Indeed, my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, in an exchange of correspondence in French, agreed that this union was a very silly idea, the two cultures too far apart to be bridged by mere love. The marriage was not going to last, they said – and yet my parents were married for 50 years, until Luigi’s death in 2013.
It was not always easy, but she decided to make it work by investing a great deal in caring for the family at the expense of her own career. She continued to work, as a writer for Business International, a spin-off of the Economist, then teaching English as a foreign language at Luiss university in Rome, where she was very much liked by students.
Her desire to embed herself firmly within the Italian mode of living was also due to a deeply felt need for stability. Born in Derby to Eleanor (nee Redfern) and Henry Royce, an engineer for Rolls-Royce, Clare attended Derby and Warwick high schools. Having a father who worked on plane engines, a sector of vital importance for the war effort, she moved often: from Derbyshire to Scotland, where the family gave shelter to evacuees, providing “hot beds” that were slept in alternatively during night and day by different people.
The family then moved to the US in 1943, and on their return in 1945 were the lucky ones – two of the other boats in their convoy were torpedoed. Those experiences, and trauma, affected Clare deeply: she was always attentive to those less lucky than her, and eager to give her children, and our friends, a very stable and welcoming home. A voracious reader with an encyclopedic knowledge across a number of fields, she loved travelling before it became easy and fashionable. And she was well known for being a great cook – quite an achievement for an English woman in Italy.
Clare is survived by her sister, Diana, her children, Renato, Alessandro and me, and six grandchildren.
