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Once the United States entered into the war my mother and I did not receive any more news from my father who, as we learned later, was interned in Boston and only later was able to become a "legal " immigrant and remain in the United States. My mother and I continued to receive a stipend from the Italian Lines which had been my father's employer. We supported ourselves with the food that our land provided us and also with the income derived from the sale of honey produced by my aunt Bambina Di Vito's apiary. She had about one hundred beehives. As the war went on, imported products like sugar became more and more unavailable. Sugar was replaced by the only local substitute, honey, the demand and the price of which were very high. In 1942 our bees produced a lot of honey and we made a substantial sale that gave us adequate money to last us for a couple of years.

After completing my second year of High School in Lanciano I went back to Fallo. Because the war activities were unpredictable it was decided that I should receive private tutoring by the village priest, a common practice in those villages, and then take a special examination of re-entry into the public schools at a higher level and thus regain the missed regular years of school attendance. The priest followed the State Program of Studies and taught all the subjects required. The emphasis was on Italian, Mathematics, Latin, History and French.
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We used the standard texts used by the Public Schools for the levels for which I was preparing. This was my first serious acquaintance with the Classics and literature for which I developed a liking which has lasted throughout my life. The epic poems, such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata excited my imagination. The romantic poems of Pascoli, Leopardi, Foscolo, Carducci led me to the discovery of feelings which had been latent in me. I began to explore with curiosity, admiration and some understanding the family library which had come down to us from the priest, Don Antonio Castracane, and mostly from his father Giuseppe who must have had a taste for the classics. In this small library there were works by Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Petrarca, Manzoni, Caro, Monti, Metastasio, Hugo, Molière, Ariosto, Pascal, Goldoni and so many others. There was also a collection of The Emporio Pittoresco, an illustrated newspaper of the 1860s', bound in volumes. I began to read some of them with frequency. I also came to love the exquisite binding of many of these books. A few of them were bound with sheepskin and printed on old paper with a particular smell of old books. The love I had for books all my life certainly began at this time.

The war was getting worse, and troop activities in Italy began to include German troops. News were vague and often distorted by propaganda. Groups of villagers eagerly listened to the daily one o' clock news on