For the most part, Margherita Bertola Fray fondly remembers her childhood growing up in the northern Italian industrial city of Turin, or Torino en Italiano. “Oh, it’s gorgeous! Torino is the most elegant city in Italy. At that time, I experienced the best time of [my] life,” said Bertola Fray while looking at pictures of her old home town in a photo scrapbook at her kitchen table in the Old Town section of Scottsdale.

But her idyllic childhood changed quickly in 1940 when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini joined Germany and declared war on Great Britain and France in 1940. Not going along with Mussolini’s Fascists cost her father his job and got her involved as a messenger for the resistance movement, known as the Partisans.