Every place I describe in this book is real, with one significant exception: Mezzo Ciel is a fictional amalgam of San Zenone degli Ezzelini and a nearby village, Borso del Grappa, which is located on the lower slopes of Monte Grappa. I must also confess to borrowing the name for my fictional village from an actual place several kilometers north of San Zenone. I apologize to the residents of the real Mezzo Ciel for appropriating its name for my purposes, but how could I ignore the appeal of a name that translates as “halfway to heaven”? On my website you can find a link to a Google map that charts all the places I mention in Our Darkest Night, as well as an illustrated map of the fictional Mezzo Ciel and surrounding area. I have also included photographs of the places and buildings that inspired me in my descriptions of the Gerardi family’s farm, the Mazin family’s home in Venice, and the beautiful northern Italian countryside where so much of the novel takes place.

Because the dialogue in Our Darkest Night is rendered in English (at least in its original writing), anyone familiar with the Italian language will notice that I’ve made little mention of dialect. In Italy—even more so in the 1940s than today—regional differences in language are marked not by accents (as is the case in England, for example), but rather by highly localized dialects. At first I attempted to describe the differences between formal Italian and dialect, and the confusion such variations might provoke, but I soon realized there was no straightforward way to describe the differences between formal Italian and the dialect that was spoken in Mezzo Ciel. Instead I have confined myself to a few mentions of formal versus informal modes of speech and left it at that. I beg the pardon of native Italian speakers for my consequent failure to capture the beauty and complexity of their language in all its incarnations.

My descriptions of life on the Gerardi farm, and in the village of Mezzo Ciel, are based upon extensive interviews with my husband’s relatives, among them Lucia Bizzotto, Guerrino Crespi, Angela Gazzola, Mario Gazzola, Carmen Gazzola, Oscar Gazzola, Michela Jach, and Maria Zardo. Francesco Crespi, my husband’s late uncle, wrote a private memoir that describes his horror at being made to witness the Nazi massacre of partisans in Bassano del Grappa, as well as other notable memories of the war; I thank his sister Lucia Bizzotto for sharing it with me. Selva the dog is named after a much-loved family pet; and while one of her forebears was, sadly, shot and killed by a German soldier as she tried to protect my husband’s grandfather, the fictional Selva survives for one reason: I promised my children I wouldn’t allow her to die.