Hundreds of sources were used as reference for CIAO AMORE CIAO, along with personal documents and interviews. Below are the ones that I came back to over and over again to find the setting, the tone, and the feel of the book.

There is no better voice than that of Mario Rigoni Stern, the narrative poet and human guide and face of the men who fought in Russia. His memoir, published in 1953 and written in a POW camp, “The Sergeant in the Snow”, is a singular work of genius.

Online resources are also abundant if you know where to look, including Facebook’s ARMIR page. I also found “The Schio killings: a case study of partisan violence in post-war Italy” by Sarah Morgan to be a really important document to the background and forces at play in the Schio Massacre.

Giulio Bedeschi’s work is also a primary source that should be consulted first and foremost for anyone who wants to dig in deeper: his “Centomila Gavette di Ghiaccio” was the first historical book that focused-in on the tragedy in Russia. It was written in 1946 and published only in 1964, after two decades of being rejected by every publishing house in Italy. That tells its own story about the post-war reality of Italy. Before Bedeschi’s book, the silence and the complicity of the media, the political class, and the ex-fascists who simply went on with their lives after 1945 effectively silenced the echoes of those who’d had their lives given away for a cause conveniently forgotten.