Eine italienische Kindheit

An eight-year-old boy experiences the horrors of World War II first in Sicily and then in the Italian capital. His encounters with German soldiers, which were not solely negative, opened a door to German culture that would shape his entire life. Roberto Zapperi depicts the clash of two worlds, the impression that the technically proficient Germans left in the pre-modern imagination of a boy born and raised in Catania, a poor and provincial Sicilian town. He takes us through the escape from the island to Tuscany and then to bombed Rome, where American forces struck. His experiences intertwine with the increasingly devastating war and nuance his originally unreserved admiration for the German soldiers. A moving story that brings to life the lives of ordinary people in 1940s Italy.