“I don’t know, Uncle. I think maybe that was just talk.” She offered up a listless smile that wrung his heart. “And you feel different once you’ve had it.”

“But can she afford to keep it? A single woman? A laundress?”

Emma had picked up a wedge of focaccia, but put it down again. “It will be hard. She has no father. Her mother no longer speaks to her. She has no money… It won’t be easy.”

But her face said it all: she would happily have traded places.

Domenico laid his hand on hers and tried to keep the building excitement out of his voice. “Emma, I have an idea. Now don’t say no until you hear me out…”

And so the arrangements were made. With the help of a generous financial settlement from Domenico, Gia agreed to part with her baby (a little too readily for Domenico’s taste), and when Emma and Franco returned to Stresa a few days later, after their absence of six months, they, too, had a newborn baby boy to show off to the world. And the glowing Emma was her happy, sweet-natured self again.

The two infants were christened a few weeks apart at the parish church in Stresa, where Domenico’s great-great-great-grandfather had been christened in 1786, the year of the church’s founding. Domenico’s new heir was called Vincenzo Paoli de Grazia, after San Vincenzo di Paoli, the great benefactor of the poor. The Ungarettis named their baby Filiberto, after Franco’s maternal grandfather, a knife grinder. It was hardly the name Domenico would have chosen, but there was no room in his heart to begrudge anyone anything. Filiberto Ungaretti it would be.

All was well.

ONE

The Village of Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy, the Present

It was the blue Honda that had started it, both traffic policemen agreed afterward.

The two veteran traffic officers, spruce and natty in their crisp blue uniforms and their caps, belts, and crisp white shirts, were just discarding their cigarettes and pushing through the glass doors of the Polizia Municipale building to report for the morning shift when the blast of noise-squealing tires, blaring horns, warning shouts-made them turn back toward the street.