Paola: In the early summer of 1970, I took a cruise to the Caribbean aboard the Italian liner Giulio Cesare. I was with my father, who was recovering from the cancer that would return to kill him. He called the trip a reprieve from the “perils of lived life.” Onboard I met a beautiful and well-heeled girl from Milan, Paola, who, like me, was 17. A tomboy with short-cropped hair and a lilting but at the same time too-adult voice, she was a politically active young woman who hated the American presence in Vietnam and saw Richard Nixon as a dictator who would later spawn more of his ilk because, to her mind, America was a police state in disguise. She looked forward, she said, to joining the Italian Communist party when she turned 18. My crush on her was intense but ephemeral. Though after we docked at Port Everglades, Florida, we exchanged a letter or two, politics still obstructed puppy love. And we lost touch. Six years later, when I was working as a journalist in Rome and both the Communist party and rival far-left fringe groups were ascendantly violent, I opened a Milan newspaper and saw a familiar face. Three armed terrorists had tried to rob a bank. Two had been scared off, but a third had been shot by police and critically injured. Here before me was the black-and-white face of Paola, her private revolution over, and memories of watching the setting Caribbean sun, once and only once holding hands, over for good. Only now, more than 50 years later, has her presidential prophesy come at least partly true.