If you haven't seen this heart tugging TV Presentation on your PBS 
Station, be on the alert. Patricia Yollin, of  The San Francisco Chronicle  wrote about it on Friday, July 19, 2002
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Love, Italian American style 
Documentary explores fates of WWII POWs
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Agnes Piva has been "madly in love" with the same man since 1944. He's dead now -- has been for 27 years -- but Agnes cultivates her memories with a schoolgirl's ardor. 

"I've got about 1,000 letters he wrote," she said. "I'm reading them again. They're just as thrilling as they were then." 

The unlikely romance of Agnes and Bruno Piva was a product of one of the least-known chapters of World War II: the arrival of 51,000 Italian prisoners of war in the United States in 1942. "Prisoners in Paradise," an hourlong documentary that will air on KQED at 6 p.m. Sunday, tells the story of their lives in camps around the country. 

"I was very patriotic and then I went and fell in love with an Italian prisoner," said Agnes, featured in the documentary, who still lives in the house her parents bought for $10,000 in San Francisco's Castro district in 1925. 

It's the house where she and Bruno met in 1944 and where they raised four children. It was one of many houses in California that opened their doors to the POWs, held in camps at the Presidio, on Angel Island, in Benicia, Oakland, Sacramento, Pomona, San Luis Obispo, San Bernardino and elsewhere in the state. 

The 51,000 prisoners who ended up in the United States were among 600,000 Italians captured by Allied forces. Italy surrendered in September 1943, soon after most POWs arrived, and then switched to the Allied side -- but the United States refused to let the prisoners go home, wanting their labor instead. 

Almost 90 percent chose to collaborate, joining Italian service units catering to the U.S. Army. They sorted and shipped war supplies, maintained vehicles, cleaned camps and cooked for soldiers and officers. In their spare time, they visited -- and received visits from -- homesick Italian Americans. 

Agnes said her Genoa-born father would pick up a few POWs at the Presidio and bring them to dinner. One Sunday evening, Bruno Piva showed up. 

"He came on strong," said Agnes, a lively and elegant woman of 79, as she spread old photo albums over her coffee table. "I gave him a hard time." 

They danced in her living room to "Rum and Coca-Cola" and "You Belong to My Heart." The next time Agnes saw Bruno, he declared his love. 

He left in September 1945. They married in Italy a year later and lived there six months, until Bruno's visa came through and they returned to San Francisco. Agnes was a homemaker and Bruno a window washer. At age 54, he died of lung cancer. 

"We had a wonderful relationship," Agnes says in the film. "I never had a headache. So it was a lot of fun." 

Camilla Calamandrei, who produced and directed the documentary, estimated that about 10 percent of the POWs married American women. In some cases, the relationships have lasted more than 50 years. 

"It's really phenomenal," said Calamandrei, on vacation in Ireland, in a phone interview. "They saw each other a couple of Sundays. And then the women would make a decision to go halfway across the planet in a boat. That's pretty dramatic." 

It took Calamandrei four years and $250,000 to make the movie. The 37-year- old Manhattan resident, who graduated from Stanford University's documentary film program, didn't know the POWs existed until 1990, when an uncle in Florence mentioned his years as a prisoner in Stockton. 

The documentary includes U.S. government film, photographs unearthed from closets and shoe boxes, and rare newsreel clips. 

There is footage of Italians surrendering during Benito Mussolini's ill- fated North Africa campaign, getting their clothes disinfected after landing in New York, being transported to the camps by train, reading in bed in their barracks, playing soccer and picking cotton. And it shows them glimpsing the ruins of Naples from their homebound ship in 1946. 

Calamandrei said a third of the film was shot in the Bay Area. Historical footage is punctuated by interviews, in the United States and Italy, with the former prisoners and with POW wives or widows. 

"I really fell in love with these guys," Calamandrei said. 

One POW described how the prisoners tied towels to their cots to learn the boogie-woogie so they could dance with American girls. Another recounted the prisoners' first encounter with cornflakes, which none of them had any idea how to eat. 

"I saw America and said, 'This is another world,' " Virgilio Razzo, of San Francisco's Excelsior district, recalls in the film. 

Calamandrei said "there was huge freedom in California," especially compared with the East Coast, and POWs in San Francisco even rented their own halls for dances. Still, not everyone was thrilled with their presence or their contact with American girls. 

"I'd get filthy looks and 'dago lover' from our soldiers," Agnes Piva said, recalling her visits to Bruno. Her cousins and girlfriends worried that the POWs were too "old country" or had wives in Italy, while neighbors with sons in the U.S. Army smiled at her "through clenched teeth." 

Her family didn't mind, though. "My parents loved him," Agnes said. "It didn't bother them that he was a prisoner -- as long as he was Italian."