What does it take to turn a life-long journalist and university writing teacher into a first-time novelist? Well, in the case of Paul Salsini, who teaches at Marquette, all it took was a little inspiration to fuel the passion (and a lot of work doing the writing!).

Salsini's first novel, "The Cielo: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany," is the fruit of conversations he had with a cousin in Italy.

It is the story of the citizens of a small town northwest of Lucca, in the region of Tuscany, who are evacuated by the local priest to a trio of remote hillside farmhouses before the arrival of German troops in their village.

While there, they struggle to survive not only the war raging around them, but the privation and stress of being crowded together in small quarters with people they don't necessarily like.

"The reason I started was we'd stayed at this farmhouse in the hills where my grandfather once lived and it had been in ruins the first time I'd been there but lately someone else had bought it and they restored it and it's now for rent," Salsini recalls.

"We asked my cousin Fosca who lives in the village that's at the foot of this hill and we asked her what's this all about and she said that during WWII her family and other people in the village went up to the farmhouse when the Germans were fighting the partisans in that whole area.

"It was a really terrible situation. And she talked about they didn't get along very well at first and there were deprivations -- there wasn't enough food, there wasn't enough water -- and they could hear all the fighting around them and it was just a very tense situation. And it was very interesting to me."

On the plane back to the States, Salsini, who worked for many years at the Milwaukee Journal and has written travel articles for the New York Times, thought the story would be a great one to tell. And he intended to do it in a non-fiction book ... at first.

"The problem was I was here and the story was there and I had to be here to teach" Salsini says.

"I didn't know the language to talk to people, the documents were in Italy, whatever they were, and it was 60 years ago, so while Fosca remembered some things, I don't know how many other people would remember anything. I thought, OK, I can't do it non-fiction, so I'll do it fiction."

Salsini used Fosca's story as the foundation and invented everything else based on his research back home, reading about the war in Italy, the Nazis and the partisans.

In the space of less than a year, Salsini wrote two drafts of his novel. Then he learned of the 1944 massacre at Sant'Anna di Stazzema, in which German soldiers massacred more than 500 civilians in retribution for attacks by Italian partisan fighters.

"I picked up the New York Times and I saw this story about the massacre at Sant'Anna di Stazzema and I thought 'I didn't know anything about that.' Fosca had never mentioned it. But when I looked at a map it was 30 miles away from where I was setting the story. How can I not include the massacre."

So, Salsini flew back to Italy two more times to talk to a partisan, to visit Sant'Anna, to talk to a museum director there and to do more research.

The result is a novel that is rife with facts and details and the sorts of things that really bring a story to life. But "The Cielo" is more a human story than a historical one, focusing on how people survive during wartime when danger and death are all around. And, perhaps a little surprisingly, he does it very well, considering it's his first attempt at long fiction.

"It's really about how people survive in a war and I think that has relevance," he says. "You think of Iraq now and I can't imagine living in war like that. And how they can survive and how they can even live day to day life."

Post a comment / write a review.