(This is an unedited and unpublished cut from The Girl from Borgo.)

One of the first violinmakers Dad met in Cremona was Piergiuseppe, a handsome twenty-something-year-old from Cremona with curly black hair and a relaxed, friendly demeanor. He lived down the street from us on Vicolo Pertusio with his wife, Luisella, and their baby daughter, Eva.

One day, when Piergiuseppe and Dad walked back from school together, Dad asked if he and Luisella knew of any children in the neighborhood Paul and I could play with. Of course, they said: Luisella had a young sister, Cinzia, and a little brother, Mauro, seven and nine respectively, and they lived in our same building, as a matter of fact. Our apartments faced each other over a common inner courtyard, and from our balcony, I later understood, I could see into their kitchen and hear their voices.

On Cinzia and Mauro’s first visit we stood and looked at each other speechless. Paul and I spoke no Italian, and Mauro and Cinzia no English. We stared at each other for a while, and Cinzia and I giggled a little, but shortly thereafter they left, without exchanging a word. A few days later my dad saw Cinzia again and he invited her to come back. She did, by herself. I was not feeling well, and my mom had spread a blanket on the floor in front of the French doors where I could read and play in the warmth of the sunlight. I had my six stuffed animals and dolls with me, and Cinzia came and sat by me, on the colorful plaid blanket. Somehow, we developed a wordless understanding, a code, and we took to each other immediately and simply.

Cinzia—dubbed Ciccio by her family, and henceforth by me—had thick, straight jet-black hair that reached the bottom of her back. Her mother insisted she keep it pulled back from her eyes with a fascia, a headband, which she wore at all times, in a rainbow of colors. She had dark-chocolate eyes and pale, cream-colored, flawless skin. She was skinny like me, about my height, and we had almost identical noses with a bump on the bridge.

Ciccio and I developed an epic friendship. In the span of weeks, we moved from not speaking at all to an intuitive form of communicating to being indivisible and like-minded collaborators up to no good. We did not go to the same school—her family had moved recently to Vicolo Pertusio, fortuitously for me!—so we spent our mornings apart, but we spent every other possible minute together starting right after lunch, downstairs in the vicolo, in my room, or at her house.

Ciccio’s mom, Grazia, was a full-time mother and a homemaker in her mid-forties. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned like Ciccio, with a fiery and nervous temperament. Ciccio’s dad, Carlo, in his early fifties, was the director of a bank; he was short and wiry, like a fighter, with a long rectangular face and square jaw, steel-rimmed glasses, and a severe disposition. In addition to Ciccio and Mauro, Carlo and Grazia had had two grown daughters, Pia and Luisella, then nineteen and twenty, who no longer lived at home.

Since Pia and Luisella had moved out to live with their respective boyfriends, Grazia’s mom had come to live with them. The nonna was an elegant old lady with bejeweled fingers and snow-white hair; she had a loud cackling laugh that showed off her long teeth, and she told a constant string of funny stories in Cremonese, a language all of its own and unintelligible to the non-local. Because nonna was old and had swollen legs, she walked slowly and with a shuffle, but she was vivacious, she dressed nicely, and she went out and about the city, meeting her friends in the park for ice cream.

The balcony of our apartment looked down into the Sartori’s kitchen, where every evening the family gathered like clockwork for dinner. The sounds of the daily ministrations in anticipation of dinner traveled through the courtyard and up to our apartment: Grazia cooking, the dishes clanking; Grazia yelling for Ciccio to come set the table; Carlo coming home from his job at the bank; Grazia yelling for Ciccio to summon her grandmother; then Carlo walking into the kitchen after having changed out of his business suit; nonna shuffling through the apartment and into the kitchen; then Grazia serving dinner and Grazia yelling for Mauro to get up from the couch and come to the table; and finally Pia coming in late from her job as a hairdresser and sitting down at the table with a breezy air. At last they would begin to eat and I could hear the clanking of the silverware and the sounds of people eating.

Sometimes dinner was quiet, but more often there was some kind of commotion over something–anything from Mauro’s poor table manners to Ciccio’s bird-like eating habits—and before dinner was halfway through, Carlo and Grazia were bickering back and forth in their unintelligible Cremonese. Finally, Carlo would rap his knuckles on the table and say his last word, and silence would fall as everyone finished eating. Then Grazia cleared the table with Ciccio’s help, sometimes still mumbling under her breath, and Carlo went back into their bedroom to smoke at the window.

I loved eating at Ciccio’s, which I did several times a week. Ciccio and I hated to part at the end of a play day, and dinner together was a simple and delicious way to stay longer. I loved the commotion of her household, and I loved Grazia and her food. Ciccio and I begged for her minestra in brodo, her riso in bianco, her passato di verdure, and the irreplaceable cotoletta alla Milanese, a staple in the house. The riso was creamy and delicious and sat just so in the plate, shiny and unmovable but soft; the cotoletta came slightly browned with lemon juice squeezed on top, and then, finally, always delicious potatoes.

After lunch Grazia pulled the shutters in the bedroom and Carlo rested before returning to his job at the bank. Ciccio and I played in her bedroom in the semi-darkness, quietly, the shutters pulled down against the sunlight and the heat, trying to not make noise. When the stores opened back up in the afternoon, and the clanking of the store’s rolling metal shutters shook the alleyway, Carlo went back to work and Grazia got ready to grocery-shop for dinner. I loved to stand behind her as she put on her makeup, watching her reflection in the folding mirror set on the kitchen table, as she pulled her hair back with a headband, opened her powder case, and powdered her nose and her cheeks, the powder rising and itching my nose. She applied her red lipstick with three soft strokes and then dabbed, then looked at me in the mirror and smiled.

After Grazia left to shop, Ciccio and I would go outside onto Vicolo Pertusio and out into the surrounding streets and alleyways to play. Piazza del Duomo, Via Solferino, the giardino pubblico—it was all our territory to roam. At the ages of six and seven or so we thought we owned this big city, though it was all within a few small blocks, and there we ran and hid and chased each other; we looked at our reflections in the store windows and made fun of each other and danced, sometimes dressed like twins. We roamed through the Galleria—a building erected during Fascism on the ground of Stradivari’s home and a row of violinmakers’ workshops—and looked in the storefronts on the corso. If we had 50 lire we got candy at the Sperlari store or a gelato at the Duomo, then we walked to the park to sit on a bench and watch the pigeons. Often we found Ciccio’s nonna there sitting with other old ladies feeding bread and corn to the birds. When we did not have 50 lire, we went to Nizzotti’s deli/grocery store at the end of the vicolo and got rosette with prosciutto cotto and chewing gum on credit.

—Dopo passa mia mamma a pagare, eh!—Ciccio would tell the lady at the counter, speaking with her melodious Cremonese inflection. My mom will come by later to pay!

At the time, shop owners let regular costumers do that, and soon I learned to do that, too, though my mom did not like it. Then we would sit on the step to the calzolaio’s store, Armando, the shoemaker, and eat our merenda—every Italian child’s sacrosanct snack—surrounded by the sweet smell of shoe polish and leather.

Sometimes, though, especially in winter, we stayed in and found mischief somewhere in the house. If the nonna was out and she forgot to lock her bedroom door, we dug through her room and her armoire looking for secret trinkets and jewels. La nonna lived in a back bedroom, off of Ciccio and Mauro’s room. She had an armoire full of furs and beautiful lacy dresses and a bathroom full of powders, potions, and perfumes in pretty dark bottles. Ciccio would gift me her grandmother’s things, and until recently I had several of her pilfered items. When we heard the front door open we’d quickly put everything back the way we found it and retreat quietly just as she shuffled slowly by and to her room, mumbling to herself.

Ciccio reminded me recently of her nonna’s sweet tooth and her habit of buying pastries and chocolates and hoarding them under her bed. She pulled her stash out at night, when the house was asleep, and the rustling of the wrapping paper would wake Ciccio, asleep in the next room. Every now and then Grazia would go clean under the bed and find piles of chocolates and trays of sweets.

—Te set ingurda, ma qualvolta te fet n’imbaras che te crepet!—Grazia warned her mother in Cremonese. You are gluttonous, but you’ll see that sooner or later you’ll get indigestion that will kill you! And it did, finally, some years later.

Ciccio and I played in my room, too, whose windows opened to one of Cremona’s main streets, Corso Mazzini. It was lined with elegant storefronts and businesses, and in the evening before dinnertime it bustled with people shopping, going to dinner or returning home from work.

One day Ciccio and I decided it would be fun to throw some water on the people walking below. From three floors up, who would possibly find us?

The first few times we bought balloons, filled them with water, and threw them out my bedroom window, diving to the floor in hysterical peels of laughter every time we hit a target. Then we escalated to a bucket. We went to the kitchen and filled it with water, then rising onto our tiptoes with all our strength we inched the bucket to the edge of the sill and tilted it outward. A river of water gushed on the heads below, soaking them.

Our building had no entrance on Corso Mazzini, so initially our victims could not understand where the water was coming from. But after we did this for several days in a row, a man armed with an umbrella found his way to Vicolo Pertusio and the front door of our building. He rang all the doorbells, including ours, but when my father answered the doorbell speaker he couldn’t understand what the man was saying and he went away.

In winter Cremona was cold and all windows were shut against the dampness of the Po. But in spring and summer Carlo and Grazia opened their large bedroom windows onto Vicolo Pertusio and Carlo would stand at the window, his elbows leaning against the window sill, smoking and looking out. When we played outside in the evening we could look up and see Carlo’s cigarette burning in the dark, and we knew to be vigilant.

Once, on a lazy summer afternoon when we were nine or ten—we were already living in Cetona and I was visiting for a few weeks—Ciccio and I went to the Upim, a department store just down the street from our house, and we decided to shoplift some candy. Taking turns playing guard, we stuffed our pants with so much candy that even the unobservant would have noticed. As we went to leave the store a woman stopped us.

—Dove pensate di andare voi due? —she said. Where do you two think you’re going?

—Venite con me!—she said sternly, guiding us by the shoulders into an elevator.  Come with me!

She took us to the store director’s office and there we were ruthlessly interrogated until we were both whimpering and crying and blaming one another.

—È stata idea sua! — It was her idea!

—No, è colpa sua! — No, it is her fault!

The director wanted our personal information but when I gave him mine he wouldn’t believe me.

—Dove sei nata?—he demanded. Where were you born?

—Chicago,—I said in Italian, of course. In Italian ci cago means I poop on it. That is what the man thought I was saying to him.

—Dove abiti?—he asked me. A Cetona, I said.

—Smettila di prendermi in giro! Smettila!—he screamed. Stop making fun of me! Stop it!

Finally Ciccio surrendered her home phone number—my parents fortunately did not have one—and Grazia came to get us at the store. After paying for the candy we had stolen, she walked us home in dead silence and warned us to be ready for when Carlo came home. That evening Ciccio got a solemn whipping with her father, but after I implored pitifully Carlo agreed to not tell my dad. I remain grateful to him to this day, though I have since confessed.

Ciccio and I looked forward to a lifetime together. It seemed possible then, even likely, right there in Vicolo Pertusio, playing in our skinny jeans. But it was not meant to be. It wasn’t long before Cetona had taken me in, and it would be thirty-three years before I saw Ciccio again.