After breakfast we were joined by a local amateur WWII historian who was to be our guide for the day. We first went up into the mountains to the site of an American encampment. Here we were shown a garbage pit where we were our guide quickly uncovered the head of a panzerfaust (hand held rocket launcher used against tanks), a mess kit and machine gun bullets. (I wonder if he had salted the site for us?)
Next we went to a German concrete bunker that had held a piece of artillery. After this we visited the site of a field hospital where P. D. had spent time when he broke his arm during a German shelling.
We stopped at a local restaurant for a lunch of fry bread, cold cuts, cheese wine and coffee.
Next we saw the German cemetery where 30,000 are buried. Our host told us that he and his group find one or two German soldiers a year in fox holes and they are formally buried in this cemetery.
We next visited a school building that our historian host’s group will
convert to a museum. Steve had spent the night in this building last year when he had come to Italy for a demonstration parachute jump. It was during this trip that he first met Alberto in the Rover Joe radio jeep. Their friendship would lead to our trip to bring P. D. to Parma for the Liberation Day parade.At the point the weather was turning cold and a light rain began to fall. In spite of this we toured another reconstructed German bunker and a monument to American soldiers who had died taking a strategically important hill.
After returning to our hotel for a short rest we went to an inn for a dinner of breads with cooked tomatoes, small omelets with truffles, salad, beef (a specialty of the area) and several wines. For dessert we were served small sweet cookies that we dipped in priest wine, a sweet wine made from grapefruit. After dinner our historian guide and his friends arrived to meet Rover Joe. Toast were drunk, stories told and gifts.
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