Word: alba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When Alba Guidotti added three strokes of the bell to her ringing of the Angelus in her uncle's church, her sweetheart, Rinaldo. knew that she would slip out that night and wait for him in the vineyard. They were very happy, but when at last it came time to talk of marriage, Alba's father said no-again and again. He was just about to give his consent, he says now, when Rinaldo was drafted into Italy's World War II army and sent to Greece...
...letter came from him; after two years, word reached Alba that he was dead. "I thought I would go mad," she says. Instead, she went to Florence and joined a strict cloistered order, the Benedictines of Vallombrosa. After a seven-year novitiate, she took her "perpetual" vows in 1950. The same year, she had a visit from a thin man who had suffered much-Rinaldo...
Rinaldo had fallen sick, served time in prison camps, fought with the partisans, been invalided at war's end to hospitals in northern Italy. When he returned to Falciano and found Alba gone, her family told him she had married and moved to Belgium. But Rinaldo continued the search and found her at last, only to hear her tell him through the convent grating: "I love you no more. I have said goodbye to the world...
Rinaldo came back-on visit after visit for seven years. And for seven years Alba told Rinaldo it was no use. But she kept thinking about Rinaldo in her long hours of prayer and at her manual labor and her meager meals...
...refused to see Rinaldo until she was released from her vows* by special papal dispensation. Last week Onetime Nun Alba was settling down with her husband Rinaldo in a three-room flat in the Tuscan village of San Romano. "Just think of it," wrote the weekly Settimo Giorno, "a happy ending...