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Started reading
January 3, 2025
For my parents, who taught me goodness most of all —and— in memory of Janko Marjanovic, the perfect kind of teacher and the kindest of men
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. —WRITER ERNEST HEMINGWAY
What kind of world is this, what kind of creatures are we, how much management do we need to keep us from being ourselves? —DIRECTOR GEORGE STEVENS
Verum esse ipsum factum. —PHILOSOPHER GIAMBATTISTA VICO
THE GRAND HOTEL FLORA, ROME November 13, 1943 The handbag is almost empty inside. Just her coin purse, compact mirror and lipstick, and a pistol in the false bottom.
At twenty, she still looks as young as a schoolgirl, sitting in the back row, handbag primly on lap. In fact, she could be any girl in occupied Rome, on her way home from a factory or shop job, trying to meet her boyfriend before the curfew is enforced.
Nino wanted her to be able to protect herself, but now she can hit a target, too. Armed and ready to kill, they have both joined the newly formed Gruppi di Azione Patriottica along with Nino’s old university professors. The GAP is committed to doing everything necessary to rid Italy of the Nazis; they all agree that nothing less than guerrilla warfare will work.
Girls like her and her sister are as much a part of the resistance as the men, in a country where women can’t vote. No one suspects the pretty young things, hiding cryptic messages inside the seams of their skirts and the heels of their shoes. No one suspects a girl like her to carry a gun.
Her mission is simple. Kill the Nazi commander from inside Porta Pinciana across the street, a clear ten meters away, then slip through that ancient archway into the Borghese gardens. A bicycle lies hidden for her in the grove behind the Topolino, the little children’s movie theatre. She will ride the blue bike in the dark until she spots Nino in his truck, ready to drive her across the Tiber and up the hill to the motherhouse of the Canossian Daughters of Charity.
She can never go home. She can never risk her mother’s life that way. Eventually she will be given new orders, new ammunition, new messages to convey. She has no fear in her heart. There is no use for fear. Fear has led to the hell they are in. All she feels is anger, and all one can do with anger is act. Each action will spur another, then another one after that, until the day finally comes when all these acts merge stream-like into a thundering whole, the force of which will tip them over the side of victory. Her people must find a way to move forward together or the entire world will be
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The Cinecittà studios had been built in the 1930s by Fascist ruler Benito Mussolini
David had been deported from North Africa to Italy as a prisoner of war.
“That was her code name—the schoolgirl assassin. She shot an SS commander right outside these doors.” Levi pointed through the glass. “On that very spot.”
Italian family law was a Gordian knot of trying to keep parents and children together, and women in the home, through enforced marriage and the illegality of divorce. A woman pregnant by a man other than her husband could find her name missing from the birth certificate altogether, her lawful husband with full custodial rights over his non-biological child, and the biological father next in line.
“How does your anger help you?” “I think it protects me more than anything else.”
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
There was something so appealing about someone with all the answers, even ones that could turn out to be wrong. We lessen the load of life, shift its weight onto someone else, when we follow instead of lead—when we don’t even try to ask the right questions. Why would we, when the lessening itself is what we are really after?
Even the smallest act of kindness keeps the best of the human condition in operation, while being the least we can do to honour the greatest acts of all.
