She always finished her dessert before anyone else. When it comes to her childhood, the story I know best is that her brother, the next oldest, liked to savor his treats and would still be nibbling the edge of a pastry or taking little licks off his gelato cone, and she’d be done, and eyeing his.

At seventeen or eighteen, she took a whole bunch of kids to France, on a cultural-religious trip. “Uncle Paolo came, too, and we all slept on trains parked overnight at the station. I gave him a wonderful classical guitar as a thank-you gift.”

They lived on a street named after a composer, at the edge of the African quarter, by Prati Fiscali, where there still wasn’t much development. Down in the valley, the shacks of the Abruzzians who’d come to Rome to work in construction after the war. They scraped those shacks together from rubble. My mother’s group of friends, all graduates of the same high school—all still Catholic back then, I think—would gather by the shacks and assist people with their practical concerns and try to bring some cheer to this shantytown. One time, she told me, “I was stroking this little girl’s hair, I don’t know why, and ugh, so gross, they were crawling up my fingers—lice? Bed bugs?”

They read Mao’s Little Red Book. They listened to Inti-Illimani, Joan Baez.

She was the one who oversaw the work with the people there, and a number of the boys from the group were interested in her, including a somewhat homely boy four years her junior, just starting his engineering studies, very ambitious, the son of an Abruzzian no less, but from a middle-class, fascist family, which no one discussed. He wore a “poop-brown” sweater and courted her just like the rest of them. He snuck out to work with this group, bringing along a change of shoes so he wouldn’t return home late at night in a pair covered in mud.

Meanwhile, my mother’s siblings were engrossed in a new Catholic movement founded by a Spanish artist who’d had a vision of the Madonna on the wall of a building and started “announcing the Gospel” and forming groups inspired by the first Christian communities, so they could live, “breaking the word together,” announcing the Gospel to others and subsisting off mutual aid. My mother also “entered the community,” but one night she wanted to go “celebrate Mass” instead of celebrating my father’s birthday, and he told her: “If you don’t come celebrate my birthday, we’re through.” Which her siblings took as a lack of faith.