Many thanks to the staff of the Imperial War Museum, London, who made it possible for me to study several unpublished accounts of life in occupied Naples, and who even provided me with a map, once issued to servicemen on leave, of the city as it stood after the bombing. Zi’Teresa’s still exists, incidentally—I recently ate there a very good baby octopus simmered in squid ink and tomatoes.
The man who identified Beethoven as Belgian originally did so in the hearing of E. M. Forster, as recounted in his 1958 essay A View without a Room.
The quotations on pages 156–60 are from the twelfth edition of Married Love by Dr. Marie Stopes. By 1940, it has been estimated, this guide to lovemaking had sold more than a million copies.
I am also indebted to Sophia Loren, In Her Own Words, which describes a childhood in wartime Naples and Pozzuoli; Dear Francesca by Mary Contini, which contains many recipes and recollections of her grandparents’ upbringing in Campania; and the wartime memoirs The Gallery by John Horne Burns, From Cloak to Dagger by Charles Macintosh and Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City by Raleigh Trevelyan. My sources about Neapolitan cooking include Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories and Antonio and Priscilla Carluccio’s Complete Italian Food. A big thank-you to Jamie for the tip about using a filing cabinet as an oven.
The suggestion that the CIC (later to become better known as the CIA) covertly tried to hinder the communist partisans has become known as the “Operation Gladio” theory. I’m very grateful to Blaze Douglas for bringing it to my attention.
Several friends read the manuscript and made comments, including Bobby Sebire and Peter Begg. Particular thanks to Tim Riley for responding so unstintingly to my request for a really tough critique, and to Anna Actis, a reader from Italy, for corrections to my Italian.
My agent, Caradoc King, encouraged me over a very good Italian lunch to start writing this story, and over another, eighteen months later, encouraged me to finish it. I doubt if either would have happened without his help. I also owe a huge debt to my publisher at Time Warner, Ursula Mackenzie, who told me to write whatever I wanted to, and my editor Jo Dickinson, who had to put up with the—sometimes unsteady—results as The Wedding Officer slowly took shape.
This book is dedicated to my father, one of that extraordinary generation of young men and women who decided in 1939 that democracy, decency and kindness were worth giving their lives for. For as long as mankind continues to tell stories, their story will be told and retold as an inspiration to us all.
ALSO BY ANTHONY CAPELLA
THE FOOD OF LOVE
*1 Literally, “When the chicken pees.”
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*2 A contented stomach, a forgiving heart; but a hungry stomach pardons no one.
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*3 “The only thing your head is good for is keeping your ears apart.”
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*4 “So you say, ‘Farewell, I’m leaving!’/Going far from what the heart clings to…/From the land where you found love…/But would you rather not come back?”
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THE WEDDING OFFICER
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Time Warner UK hardcover edition published April 2006
Bantam Books hardcover edition / May 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Anthony Capella
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Capella, Anthony.
The wedding officer : a novel of culinary seduction / Anthony Capella. —Bantam hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. World War, 1939–1945—Italy—Fiction. 2. Cookery, Italian—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A64W43 2007
813'.6—dc22
2006102089
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90370-6
v3.0