The people of Altamura saved Marisa"s life, in more than simply physical ways. They took her in after she shot Anselm Bernhard, hid her from the ragtag remnants of German soldiers straggling back from the battlefields who would have taken her into custody. They even hid her from the Americans to avoid complications and questions that might have made Marisa"s life more difficult.
Hiding a Venetian woman in the Mezzogiorno shouldn"t have been so easy. Northerners have a lighter complexion and, if that didn"t give her away, her dialect would have. There is very little correspondence between the Italian language spoken in Venice and that spoken in the south, but the Allied soldiers didn"t know that.
So Marisa blended in and made her home in Altamura. When the war was winding down and some of
