Novelist John Domini hails from a famiglia of brave Neapolitans, men who defied Nazi occupiers and the Allied Command and the Camorra. It is a different species of courage, yet coraggio nonetheless, that Domini displays in tackling the genre of memoir in which a benighted adult son probes his father’s European haunts to mine buried war exploits.

That Vincenzo Vicedomini’s hometown is Naples, already immortalized in the popular American consciousness by Elena Ferrante and Vittorio De Sica, demands an excavator worthy of Pompeii.