Preface
Rainbows in the Fountain
It was a clear September evening on the shores of Southwestern Connecticut, a gift for my 60th birthday. I went to the garden to pick a few clusters of grapes while I waited for my cousins to arrive from Virginia Beach and Vandergrift, Pennsylvania. As I returned and opened the door, I heard the song “Lilli Marlene” playing on the radio. The melody stopped me in my tracks. I suddenly was transported back to Italy at the age of four, when I snuck into the forbidden room of our house occupied by German soldiers to rewind the gramophone, wanting to listen to that song. I recalled the windowpanes rattling from the white-starred airplanes. The stiff-winged birds that streaked over my head, bombed the German convoy, then disappeared behind Mount Ocre to the west. I felt the light mist of the Apennine Mountains filtering through my lungs. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and listened. The melody conferred a sense of joy and sadness as the past reappeared. It triggered emotions bottled up inside me for the past 56 years. I walked up the stairs and sat on the top step, hidden from the kitchen, to compose myself. That song that had captivated my heart since childhood and resonated periodically through my adult life now recurred with increased intensity. That night its impact was so great it brought pain. My vision blurred as I saw a framed photograph of Nonna Antonina hanging on the stairway wall, cradling me at the age of four months while gentle snow fell on my cloaked head for the first time. Since I had been conditioned to believe that real men don’t show emotion, I wandered into another room.
“Did you hear what’s playing on the radio?” asked my wife from the kitchen. “This one is in English. Do you know what they’re saying?”
“No, I wasn’t listening to the words,” I said. “The tune I remember was instrumental.”
“That’s what you should write about,” she urged as I neared the counter. “The gardening manual can wait. Write what you’re passionate about.”
I had interviewed my father’s army buddy in Italy some 30 years before, but when I returned home to America, I abandoned my plan to write about my wartime youth. Other priorities came first.
Our guests arrived and I put my feelings aside until the following day when Uncle Luigi—the family historian—came down with his wife and children from Middletown, Connecticut, to reignite my search. His knowledge of our family triggered a need to reclaim the childhood memories I had left behind in a distant, once familiar place, alive with echoing sounds and contradictory rumors. Old stories I’d heard and retold—who knows how accurate they were to start with? This memoir is an attempt to recapture the truth, seen through the eyes of a child whose former world has become an obsession.