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About
Like all boys growing up in Rome during the 1930s and 1940s, the author was expected to join the Balilla-Italy's fascist Youth Organization. With political divisions running deep in the families within his palazzo, he and his motley group of friends were recruited into the underground Resistance. Racing around Rome on bicycles, they smuggled messages and weapons for the partisans. Later, the author fled to the Italian countryside and narrowly avoided German mop-up operations-despite being sold out by his most trusted of friends. But this is much more than a war story. Lyrical in language, rich in sentimentality, and possessing the magic of a classic Fellini film, Romagnoli's memoir is a charmingly told tale of the search for manhood and the bonds of family and friendship.
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Reviews
"This book reads like a movie--one of those wonderful Felliniesque narratives filled with characters and events that could only happen in Italy. It's a beautifully told tale that illuminates one of the darkest and least understood periods in Italian and World War Two history, told with the humor and optimism of youth. It explains a very complicated and painful time through the eyes and activities
Paul Paolicelli, author of Under the Southern Sun and Dances with Luigi
"Personable, gently humorous memories of adolescence under Mussolini by an Italian chef and author....It was a heady, dangerous time for the youth, and his portraits of these local heroes and villains form an invaluable depiction of a historically significant time and place. Heartfelt sketches of a deeply troubling era in Italian history."
Kirkus Reviews