We sat in a bright dayroom, and began to talk.

“When we had operations established, and we got the electricity back to the hospitals on the second day, and the phones working on the third, and so forth, I had time to look around a little . . . I knew the family had roots in Rome. I knew where my grandparents had come from—near the Appian Way—and it wasn’t hard to dig out some Casellas in the area. Whatever you say about those fascists, they kept good records.”

So young Sergeant Casella had ventured nervously down the Appian Way, the ancient road that led south out of Rome. In that hot autumn of 1944 the area was crowded with refugees, and everything was shabby, poor, dirty, deprived, despite the liberators’ best efforts.

He had found a “nest of Casellas,” as he put it, an extended family living under the stern eye of a black-wrapped widow who turned out to be a cousin of his father. “It was a small house in a kind of down-at-the-heel suburb. I mean it had been down-at-the-heel even before the damn occupation. And now there were, hell, twenty people living in there, stacked up. Refugees, even a wounded soldier—”

“All relatives.”

“Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero, and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms—dense and thick and buttery, though God knows where she got the butter from . . .” He closed his eyes. “I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn’t bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

“They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing . . . I couldn’t tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn’t.”

“And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?”

“It was all I could think of.”

By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking for him. In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

“Maria was really your cousin?”