When we reached the field we heard the roaring of many airplanes. My father made us squat down into the ditch boarding the street which was overgrown with tall stinging nettles.
The bombs began to drop around us and we did not care about the welts the plants were causing on our bare skin. The blue sky became completely obscured by dark clouds of smoke, there were heart-rending cries from people in the field, the roar of the airplanes and the hellish chaos made my sister scream:
‘Papả… papả…take me away from this horrible place!’
Ada screamed with terror in her voice and my father gathered us under his body and held us tight.
An eternity of horror seemed to hover over us, but eventually the airplanes which had come in three waves of triangular
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He was grateful to my father because my father had intervened in saving his life. He had been singing loudly the International in the army barracks and was to be executed for inciting enemy propaganda. His family received us with open arms. We spent the night in their farm, but we did not find peace. An aerial enemy incursion terrified us and we, again, had to run in the open fields in the middle of the night. The target was the cemetery of the village of Castellazzo. The Americans knew that the Germans hid weapons and ammunitions in cemeteries. The American aircrafts that were targeting the cemetery floated, in the night sky, lighting devices attached to small parachutes: therefore we had to run away from the lit up area of the nearby cemetery. Again my father made us squat down in a ditch full of stinging nettles. I don’t know how, but Andrea, the orderly, was with us and he was carrying Ada wrapped up in a blanket. As we lay low in the deep ditch we heard the unmistakable whistling of a bomb coming down directly above our heads and we began to say goodbyes to each other. The bomb plunged into a recently ploughed field two metres from where we were squatting and did not …show more content…
It had an unsealed main road and a square where the church and the school were located. In a prominent position on the same road which led a little further north there was a large, white villa. My father enquired about its dwellers as it looked uninhabited. He was told that the owners did not live in it and that the villa was shut for prolonged periods of time. With his captain uniform, my father commanded authority and he used it to have the main door forcibly opened. We were joined by the dressmaker and her parents.
Together we established our living quarters in the rooms which were available in the villa.
My family occupied two bedrooms upstairs. The bedrooms’ windows opened onto a beautifully landscaped garden which was tendered by unfriendly people who lived at the back end of the garden in the servants’ quarters. On the ground floor was the large kitchen with double window-doors opening onto the garden. The living rooms were locked and out of bounds for us. On the mid-flight of marble stairs there was a landing which opened onto a large balcony commanding the view of the main street.
The dressmaker and her parents also slept upstairs. We had to share the kitchen with them which may have been the cause of friction as we were no longer on speaking