After a 45-year career as a high school teacher, administrator, and coach, Anthony Delstretto found retirement boring. As the grandson of immigrants, with relatives living near Milan, and holding dual Italian-American citizenship, he began researching recent Italian history as a matter of curiosity. The events he discovered led him to create the plotline of a sweeping saga that will transport readers to an era and culture about which few Americans know a thing, yet which resonate with relevancy for our own times. The author is an avid reader of history, biographies, and historical fiction, and has been much influenced by the authors James Michener, Rick Atkinson, Patrick O'Brian, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez, Robert Caro, and Edmund Morri, as well as others.