AUTHOR’S NOTE

The beginnings of Courage, My Love were first sparked, long ago, by my grandparents. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, one in the Pacific and the other in Europe. But it was my grandmother, a military nurse in the war, who spurred my imagination with her stories. She would fold laundry, or chop vegetables, or pair socks—her hands always busy—and talk about her life in the army. She described nursing under canvas in the fields of France, setting up hospitals in bombed-out buildings, and caring for patients in the wake of now-famous battles. Eventually, she’d pause, a contemplative look in her eyes, and say, “Just remember: the world is a lot bigger than your own backyard.”

Coming from her, this meant something. My grandmother grew up during the Depression in rural Canada, and despite limited opportunities available to women, she attended nursing school. When Canada entered the war, she looked far past her own backyard and enlisted alongside the men, shipping overseas with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. The war took her first to England, then to France in the wake of D-Day, and on to Belgium, where she witnessed V-E Day. There, she met my grandfather, an American captain, and they married in a cathedral in Ghent.

My grandparents’ home was full of relics from the war. In the den, a pair of steamer trunks served as coffee tables. If you were cold, you’d be handed a scratchy, olive-green blanket that had once graced an army cot. On the walls of the bedroom where I slept, an embroidery hung, stitched by one of my grandmother’s patients in Normandy. Sometimes I’d slip into their bedroom to study their wedding photos. In them my grandparents stood, smiling and impossibly young, on the cathedral steps in Ghent, both uniformed, grinning with the combined joy of their union and the war’s end. Everywhere, the past echoed.

My grandfather rarely spoke of the war, but my grandma did. If I asked about the photos, she’d tell me what came before and after the camera’s snap. If I sat down on an old steamer trunk, she’d tell me where it had been, weaving a history I’d never have guessed belonged to the object under my seat bones. Her stories captivated me then, and captivate me still. Over time, this propelled me to seek others like them: accounts of women in history, often serving in unsung, overlooked roles, their bravery and skill and defiance of societal expectations inspiring.

Courage, My Love arose from my grandmother in this way, and also from her encouragement to see the world. Due in part to her insistence that we look far afield in life, I traveled to Europe during and after college, living in Italy for two extended periods. During one of those experiences, I had a professor who was interested in World War II, and so we visited many of the landmarks connected with the period in Tuscany and Rome. As an avid history lover, I found Italy utterly compelling. Whenever I wandered Rome, with its copper light and a past centuries deep, I would imagine all the feet that had walked the cobblestoned roads before me, and their stories. I’ve had a love affair with Italy ever since.

When, years later, I started to learn about the role of women in the Italian resistance, the idea for this novel fully ignited. I read everything I could find about them, from diaries to research papers to history books, resulting in a tower of dog-eared, highlighted volumes. I was fascinated by the story of these brave women, who resisted both the Italian Fascists and the Nazis to fight for the future of their country. Women who, like my grandmother, stepped beyond the expectations placed upon their gender and, later, were largely forgotten for it.

Of the approximately 200,000 Italians formally recognized by their government as members of the resistance, some 55,000 of them were women. Like Francesca and Lucia, they served in a variety of roles. Many started as staffette, or couriers, transporting everything from documents to weapons between partisan groups. Women also engaged in sabotage, hid vulnerable people from the Nazis, spied on the enemy, and fought in battle. As females, they could capitalize on the fact that the Nazis overlooked them, consistently underestimating their strength and cunning.

Also like Francesca and Lucia, women left the resistance changed. Prior to the war, women could only vote in local elections in Italy, and they were pressured to conform to Mussolini’s narrow view of females as homemakers and mothers. After the war, Italian women took on new roles. In 1945, they were granted the right to vote, and the general election of 1948 saw forty-one women elected to leadership positions. Learning this, I gave my characters a similar future: law school for Francesca, to suit her sense of integrity and justice, and politics for Lucia, who’d stood with her feet in so many spheres, surviving on charm, intelligence, and wit.

While the characters in this story are fictional, the events unfolding around them were inspired by what actually occurred in Rome from 1943 to 1944. As it happens in the novel, Mussolini was ousted in July 1943 following the first Allied bombing of Rome, one of only a handful. Unlike many European cities, Rome was generally spared heavy bombing because of its exceptional history and its importance to Catholicism. After Mussolini’s fall, a tense, forty-five-day period of confusion and rumor ensued before an armistice with the Allies was signed. The result was German occupation, and a country divided by its Fascist past and the promise of the future.

Rome suffered under the occupation, and the circumstances in the novel spring from history. Notable events, which actually occurred, include the bombing of San Lorenzo, the battle at Porta San Paolo, the deportation of the Jews, the false hope of Anzio and subsequent hunger and despair, the attack on Via Rasella and the reprisals in the Ardeatine Caves, and finally, liberation by the Allies. I’ve endeavored to portray an accurate account of occupied Rome, seen through the eyes of fictional characters.

Throughout the novel, I used real excerpts from radio broadcasts, newspapers, and leaflets as often as possible. This includes text from the Allied leaflets dropped on the city, the Action Party’s Italia Libera paper responding to the raid on Rome’s Jews, and Il Messaggero’s reaction to the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. The graffiti and propaganda posters also appeared, as described, on Rome’s city walls.

During the war, approximately eighty percent of Italy’s Jewish population survived, with over sixty-five percent hiding to avoid deportation. In the novel, Hans Bergmann, a fictional Hauptsturmführer inspired by real historical figures, searches for hidden Jews and partisans. He voices the common sentiment that “half of Rome was hiding the other half.” Vulnerable people did, indeed, find refuge all over the city, stowing away in private homes, convents, and churches. The Fatebenefratelli Hospital, where Lidia’s family hides, still exists on Tiber Island. The doctors there really did save dozens of Jews and anti-Fascists by inventing a fictitious, dangerously contagious disease called “Syndrome K.” It was named for the German commander Kesselring and the chief of the Gestapo in Rome, Colonel Kappler.

Another group requiring refuge were military-aged men. Boys who came of age after Mussolini’s downfall in 1943 were generally disillusioned, and therefore many ignored conscription notices and went into hiding. Furthermore, soldiers who’d been disbanded from the Royal Army in 1943 were left without leadership, often far from home, and in grave danger. Falling into German hands meant a return to the battlefield or, more likely, deportation and forced labor. Many chose to resist and go underground. Noemi Bruno, while fictional, was inspired by regular Romans who hid young men from the Germans.

The site of Francesca’s interrogation, 145 Via Tasso, is also a real place. Approximately two thousand men and women passed through the Gestapo headquarters, enduring torture and imprisonment. Today, it houses the the Museum of the Liberation of Rome. Among the extensive documents, memorabilia, and displays recounting wartime struggles and resistance in Rome, visitors can view an example of the four-pointed nails used by partisans (and fictional Francesca) to puncture the tires of German convoys.

If any liberties were taken with historical events, I’ve attempted to keep them minor, perhaps adjusting the curfew time on a particular date (curfew frequently changed in Rome, at the whim of the Germans), or omitting what the characters couldn’t yet know about events as they unfolded. An important example of this involves the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. The Nazis mandated that for every German killed, ten people would be shot in reprisal. This leads Lucia and Francesca to assume that 320 people were lost in the caves, when actually 335 men and boys were murdered. Because this wasn’t understood until much later, Lucia and Francesca can’t mourn the true number of people massacred on that terrible day.

Though fictional characters populate this story, their circumstances are rooted in historical truths. For example, Carlo Moretti and Giuseppe Gallo (Francesca’s father) were subjected to confino politico, or political exile, which was the fate of vocal anti-Fascists during Mussolini’s dictatorship. Giacomo was swept off the street during the occupation, which indeed happened to countless men of all ages, who then became forced laborers for the Nazis. They built fortifications near front lines, worked in factories, or toiled for the war effort in Germany or Poland. In Chapter Twenty-Four, Francesca and Carlo attend a meeting with an American spy to prepare for the invasion at Anzio. A real OSS agent, named Peter Tompkins, infiltrated Rome in January 1944, and he held a similar meeting with the leaders of the CLN. Finally, like Francesca and Lucia, the Italian resistance brimmed with ordinary women—housewives, students, factory workers, and matriarchs—fighting in every capacity for a future they could believe in.

Lately, I’ve pondered my interest in World War II. Why do I return, again and again, to the stories of such a devastating period? This is where my grandparents, and the women in the Italian resistance, fully intersect: By and large, the heroes of World War II were ordinary people living through unthinkable events. They provide a powerful example for how we might navigate our own lives in uncertain times. The courage of such people, who sought light amid the darkness, who kept faith in the face of tragedy, inspires hope. May the unconquerable Francesca and Lucia, and all the real women behind their story, do the same.