Ocean State Libraries

It is 1943, and Santa Cecilia has become a village of women. All the young men are away at war, except for Vito Leone, his best friend, and the shopkeeper's son. When Vito falls in love with Maddalena Picinelli, the shy and beautiful daughter of the town's most powerful family, a few obstacles appear in his path. Maddalena's sassy, iron-willed sister Carolina thinks he's a penniless fool. Her parents think his crazy mother has turned him into a mammoni,...

"Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager--obsessed with music, food, and girls--but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier--a move...

"The story of an heir's return to an abandoned town in Italy, the secrets of the family who stayed, and the long shadow of fascism and collaboration in World War II"--

"Inspired by true events, Lia levi's prize-winning novel tells the story of a Jewish family and their community during the Fascist regime in Italy, when Benito Mussolini introduced his draconian race laws. Culminating with the tragic outbreak of World War II, Levi's novel of loss and courage recounts the history of mid-century Europe through the eyes and lives of ordinary people living in extraordinary times."--Back cover.

"Lieutenant Billy Boyle could have used a rest after his last case, but when his girlfriend, Diana Seaton, a British spy, goes missing in the Vatican, where she was working undercover, he insists on being assigned to a murder investigation there so he can try to help her. An American monsignor is found murdered at the foot of Death's Door, one of the five entrances to Saint Peter's Basilica. Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, wants the killing investigated....

"Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler's clandestine Lebensborn project. Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the...