My husband and I planned our first trip to Italy quite a few years ago. We wanted to see all the touristy spots, such as Rome, Florence, and Venice. At the time, I had family in Italy that I had never met, and Bill encouraged me to try to contact a cousin in Italy with whom I was a childhood pen pal.

The last contact I’d had with Franco was back in 1983 when he mailed photos he had taken of the family and the village they lived in. Before that, we exchanged letters all through our school years. He wrote in Italian and I wrote back in English. If I was lucky, I was able to find someone to translate the letters. If not, I used an Italian to English translation book and went word by word. Google translate would have really come in handy back then.