18. Battle Scars

Fiori was a family man who worked as a handyman almost full time at Il Poggio and lived with his wife and kids in San Vicenzo a Torre.

He was a nice little guy--literally. He was only about five-foot two. 

He liked  to make conversation and didn't care if I didn't always understand every word.

There was a small forest of fairly old trees surrounding the main buildings of Il Poggio as I have said and there were very few older trees anywhere else in the vicinity and one day he told me why.

"There was a terrific battle here in World War Two." he said.  

"The Germans were in the stone buildings stoutly defending them to the death. The Italians were in the cellars drinking the wine stored there and you Americans were advancing up the hill slope. It was a terrific fight--such a terrific fight that the trees were all shot to hell with lead bullets and that's why they are still standing--because after the war when all the other trees around here were cut down for firewood, those trees near the buildings were so filled with lead bullets that when the woodsmen tried to cut them down their saw blades were damaged so bad that they let the trees stand."

Another time Fiori (the name means "little flower") pointed to the ceiling of one of the stone outbuildings. When you looked up, the wooden slats the ceiling was made with had mortar shell manufacturing marks printed on them in English.

"That wood is from crates made in the your country to hold your soldiers' artillery ammunition. Of course it was pretty high quality milled wood so the farmers here used it to re-build with after the armies passed through. One bad thing about it though, some of the wood had bugs in it that infected the cypress trees around here and that's why so many of them are dead."

This conversation took place more than half a century after said battle.

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