No one knew what had become of Gabriella’s younger brother, Moselio. Gabriella herself hadn’t heard from him since he joined the partisans in 1943, and I hadn’t been optimistic. My mother’s been dead a long time, but I still miss her. I was hoping for too much from her Pitigliano family.

Morrell and I toured the Siena Opera House, where Gabriella had performed her only professional singing role, Iphigenia, in Jommelli’s opera, thanks to which I have the most insane middle name in Chicago. We even met a frail diva, now almost ninety, who remembered Gabriella from their student days together in the conservatory. “Una voce com’una campana dorata.” A voice like a golden bell, as I knew: Gabriella used to fill our five-room bungalow in South Chicago to the bursting point when she sang.

When she arrived in Chicago, a poor, clueless immigrant, Gabriella answered an advertisement for a singer in a Milwaukee Avenue bar, where the backroom boys tried to take off her clothes while she sang “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio.”

My dad had rescued her from that, my dad wandering in for a beer in the middle of a scorching July afternoon and pulling her away from the groping hands of the bar manager. My father had been a Chicago cop, a kind and gentle man who adored my mother from that day forward.

Looking at the Baroque cupids holding up a plaster banner in the Siena Opera, I felt the gulf between the stage and the music, where Gabriella began her life, and the bungalow in the middle of the steel mills where she ended it. How could my father and I have ever been enough to make up for all that Italy’s racial laws forced her to renounce?

That part of the trip had been difficult, but when we left Siena, and Pitigliano, Morrell and I spent a pleasant two months together.