My view on Pino´s heart & mind of the book BENEATH A SCARLET SKY by author Mark Sullivan.

From nineteen-thirty-nine to nineteen-forty-five the world was involved in one of the darkest moments
in our recent history that humans could ever imagine, taking the lives of nearly six-million people around
the world and bringing out both sides of the human race, goodness and evilness, that all of us may
experiment any time when life pushes us to the limit and everything seems to be lost. Giuseppe Lela was
not different than any other young men of our time, with nice friends and a good family, with dreams and
many goals to achieve, with a romantic heart and an adventure body, a strong faith in God and in life that
made him unbreakable during the most difficult times and suddenly everything changed. Italy got involved
on the world war two on early September of nineteen-forty-three and would not see the peace until late
April of nineteen-forty-five when the allies beat the Nazis and Germans surrendered.

Our remarkable story takes place in Milan where “Pino Lela” as he was known, used to live, then he will
go through as many adventures and danger as an ordinary man may live in his entire life, only having in
mind a single and unique desire to help the unfortunate and to defeat those who were commitment to
destroy its own kind, not Italians, not Jews, not even its own family, but humans. There is a profound
meaning in the book taking away the great and wonderful tale that already is, a deep radiography of our
own essence and the only things that remain unbroken and we have inside us when everything around us
is collapsing, faith and love.

Faith in a better coming, faith in humanity, faith in God, faith in our own instinct, faith that everything will
be better and as Pino was told on the book, “Faith is a strange creature, like a falcon that nests year after
year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever”.
On the other hand, love, an incredible and mystic felling we all have experience for ourselves and for
others, that give us an invisible strength, which Nietzsche once told to the world “He who has a why to
live, can bear almost any how”. The love that led Pino to overcome the worst atrocities, the love to Ana
his lover, and how a young man in his twenty will carry his entire live and as he confessed to the author
seventy years old later he first kissed her, “some lovers never die”.

As many other things in life, BENEATH A SCARLETH SKY, can make us read it and see it as a mirror, touching
our deepest memories, our fears, our desires and our hope in life itself, at least it was the way I felt. Like
art, this book allows us to get in touch with our real essence, to be grateful for the miracle of being alive,
to be aware of this wonderful world and to find a real meaning to this mysterious existence and its relation
to the evolution of humans, its consciousness and its blissfulness and our roll of preservation of this life,
as Joestein Garder said once “We are let into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each
other—and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and
unreasonably as we arrived.”

Diego Andres Alvarez Alzate.

June 1, 2019.