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RENATO ROLANDO FERRARA  

My father was born Renato Rolando Ferrara in Indiprete (Castelpetroso) Italy on December 18, 1916. Indiprete is a small village, one of six small villages, which make up Castelpetroso. This area is located on a hill 872 metres above sea level between the two valleys of Bojano and Carpinone. Castelpetroso's five other communities are Guasto, Pastene, Casello (Castelpetroso), Camere and Casale. Castello is the community in which the municipal offices are located today as it also was at the time of my father's birth. Indiprete is the biggest village of Castelpetroso. Its name originates from the word "Interpentros" which means "among the stones". The church in this village, named Madonna della Libera, dates to about 1700 and on its inner dome wall there are painted biblical scenes of the creation. Camera and Casale are the two smallest villages; the first located in the eastern part of Castelpetroso and the other in the west. The whole area is very scenic but these two villages are especially so and many people have built homes there. Guasto, where my paternal grandmother was born and lived before her marriage, is well known because it was from this village that two young shepherd girls who witnessed the appearance of the Virgin Mary in 1888, lived.

My father told me an interesting story concerning his name. When he was called into the army at the age of 22, he received a letter addressed to Renato Rolando Ferrara and immediately thought a mistake had been made. My father was always called Rolando by his family, as he is today, but he never knew that this was actually his middle name. When the registry office confirmed this, it suddenly dawned on him that for 22 years of his life he did not know that he had another name. When I asked him if his parents had ever mentioned this to him, he said that in all that time it had never occurred to anyone to tell him that he had a different first name than that by which he was always called.