When our grandmother Raffaela -“Lella” to her family and friends - passed away back in 2005, we believed we already knew all the stories she had chosen to tell. She was a generous and articulate storyteller, very vivid and precise in her memories, and we felt sure nothing essential had been left unsaid.

It was only later, while emptying her closets (that painful ritual that follows the loss of someone you love) that we discovered three small, time-worn notebooks, carefully tucked between folded silk scarves. From the outside, they resembled children’s school exercise books, softened by age, their covers marked with faded illustrations. Inside, however, we found something entirely unexpected: they were her hand-written accounts of life during the last two years of World War II.

The pages spoke of days spent sheltering from air raids in our Tuscan hometown of Castiglioncello; of constant fear, hunger, and uncertainty; and above all, of the long, devastating 11 months without news from our grandfather Mario, who had gone missing while serving in the Italian Air Force and fighting against the Nazi regime. The emotions held within those pages felt as vivid as the notebooks themselves. These diaries had waited in silence for decades: Nonna Lella had never spoken of their existance, not even to her sons, and we had never imagined she had written, let alone hidden, something so intimate and profound.

For a long time, since that discovery, we asked ourselves what to do with these diaries: we felt the responsibility to give them a purpose and devote to them the time and space they deserved. Those pages contained important pieces of History the world should never forget, and which we felt the duty to preserve. That moment finally came in November 2025, when this became a true family project.

We began by reading every line of the three notebooks: a slow, careful process, often challenged by fading ink, pencil marks, and intricate handwriting. Each page was then scanned and transcribed, while we searched for further traces of this story in our extensive family photo albums (spanning from 1910 to 1985) and in letters that had remained untouched for decades.

Over countless espresso coffees and voice notes, we spoke with our mother Diana and our maternal uncle Marcello. Through forgotten notes tucked behind photographs, half-remembered anecdotes, and iterative conversation, fragments of a past we had never fully known began to surface. Gradually, we pieced together a fuller picture of our family’s history, alongside the historical context in which these events unfolded.

We have preserved the diaries in their original Italian to retain the integrity and emotional truth of Nonna Lella’s voice. Alongside them, we offer faithful English translations, so that readers beyond our family and our native language can equally understand and treasure her words, and through them, a more intimate history of those difficult times.