Word: valerio
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...Merritt's M.I.T. nine has been sparked by Captain Ronnie Thompson, letterman shortstop to a 2-0 Metropolitan League record. Other probable starters are Ben Sack at first, Dick Morgenstern at second, Bob Lait at third, and Paul Valerio behind the plate...
...liked our quarter," begins Valerio, the studious boy who tells the story. It was, he recalls, a place where everyone scrounged for an extra lira, where the houses rotted with age and children played on the stoops of brothels; yet Valerio and his pals, fired with adolescent hope and vanity, felt that somehow they would find life brighter than their beaten-down parents had managed...
...least as strong on sentiment as she was on sex. It was all very serious, of course, but also a little comic, and Pratolini does a neat job of simultaneously pitying and teasing his adolescents. He also succeeds in capturing the look of young love. "My companion," muses Valerio, "was a girl of 16, with a crown of golden hair, a shining innocent face; she wore green wool gloves and shoes with medium heels and knitted stockings that came to the hem of her coat, where her bare knees peeked out, a little purple from the cold...
Inevitably, the gang fell apart. Gino became a pervert and ended his life in jail. Carlo scrambled off to fight in Ethiopia and died for II Duce. Giorgio, the leader, became an antiFascist; it was he who taught Valerio that life meant more than the flashy nihilism of the Blackshirts...
...adolescence. Its true hero is the Santa Croce quarter, which Novelist Pratolini describes with the affectionate accuracy of a man remembering his childhood haunts. Symbol of common miseries and memories, Santa Croce binds the characters together until the troubles of growing up descend upon them, and meanwhile, declares Valerio wistfully, "we were glad to be friends...