straight as exclamation marks.
Elisabetta reached the rooftop and set the tureen down among the pots, then went back downstairs, retrieved another tureen, and brought it up. She worked until all of the tureens were on the rooftop, and when she finally finished, she exhaled with relief. The garden would be even more beautiful, because now it would feature Nonna’s tureens, planted in her memory.
Elisabetta felt her gaze travel upward into the dome of night sky, shaped like the underside of a tureen lid. She knew that Nonna was looking down on her, and Nonna understood that there was nothing more that Elisabetta could have done, except for rescuing thirty-four soup tureens and two cats.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Sandro
January 1942
Sandro stood outside the modest apartment house, on a residential backstreet in Ostiense in southwest Rome. Professor Tullio Levi-Civita had died in the house, just a few days ago. The professor had been sixty-eight years old, and a heart attack had taken his life. These days Sandro rarely left the Ghetto, but he had come after reading the death notice in the newspaper, published without any fanfare. Levi-Civita had received none of the memorials he deserved, the little man who was a giant in his field. Sandro wondered if anyone would ever even know of Levi-Civita, or if the Fascists would succeed in erasing him from history altogether.
An older woman dressed in fashionable clothes walked by, and when she glanced over, Sandro saw himself through her eyes, a thin young man with sunken cheeks, a worn muffler, and shabby clothes. He wondered if she could tell he was Jewish, for he felt his Jewishness now more than he ever had before, a paradoxical effect of the Race Laws.
It was a cold day, and Sandro wrapped his muffler closer, eyeing the house. He had followed Levi-Civita’s career, or what had been left of it, after the professors had been expelled. Levi-Civita hadn’t been permitted to teach anywhere, but Pope Pius XII had invited him to broadcast on the Vatican radio station, regarding new developments in science. Levi-Civita had become the first Jew ever to do so, but Sandro hadn’t been able to listen because he had been teaching.
He was paying his respects now, as best as he could, a lone mourner. He felt the loss of the professor for himself and for the country they loved. No one would ever know what other groundbreaking advances Levi-Civita would have made, had he been allowed to continue working, teaching, and publishing papers. No one could ever say which students Levi-Civita would have mentored, who would have brought advances to follow, as science builds on itself like bricks in a wall. Sandro had hoped to be among those students, but that time had passed.
He thought of the other professors expelled from the University of Rome, as if he were walking through a cemetery, reading tombstones. There was Enrico Fermi, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. His wife, Laura, had been Jewish, so he had emigrated. There was Leo Pincherle, the grandson of the mathematician Salvatore Pincherle, who founded functional analysis in Italy. Federigo Enriques. Bruno Rossi. Emilio Segre. Sergio De Benedetti. Ugo Fano. Eugenio Fubini. Bruno Pontecorvo. Giulio Racah. Franco Rasetti. And so many others at the other departments at the universities of Rome, as well as Turin, Bologna, Pavia, Padua, Trieste, and Milan.
Sandro wondered if he ever would have accomplished something as brilliant as Tullio Levi-Civita. He doubted it, but he knew for sure that he would have tried. He had wanted to try, from when he was young, from as far back as when Professoressa Longhi had told him about the independent study. He would never forget the day he got the note from Levi-Civita himself.
Sandro looked at the house, one last time. There was a low wall of gray stucco in front, with pillars that flanked an iron gate to its entrance. He walked to the gate with his bicycle, said a silent prayer, and took a small rock from his pocket, then set it on the pillar.
A loving remembrance, from one Jewish mathematician to another.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Elisabetta
May 1943
Elisabetta counted the money and ration cards from the dinner service, pleased that they had broken even again, a success in these difficult days. Food shortages were decimating the restaurant business, but she kept Casa Servano going by making the pasta herself, hiring only a waitress, and getting occasional help from Sofia. Sugar and coffee were impossible to stock, but she made ersatz