Years ago our family spent an idyllic summer in beautiful Florence, Italy, the heart of Renaissance art and architecture and literature — our vacation of a lifetime. One day we decided to drive to nearby Siena to see the Piazza del Campo and its Cathedral. As we drove through the outskirts of Florence, off in the distance lay a beautiful green tract of land spread out magically like a garden in the parched Tuscan countryside.

It turned out to be the American cemetery where some 5,000 U.S. and Canadian soldiers and airmen were buried, killed during the battles in and around Florence in the summer of 1944. The original wooden crosses and stars of David had been replaced with stunning white marble markers, running in seemingly endless rows, curving and capturing the contours of carefully manicured lawns. Each marker bore the soldier’s name and a date of death, with the hometown from which he came.