As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans — even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.

I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

every opportunity is a big opportunity,