The Brini house was a wooden double tenement opposite the Amerigo Vespucci Club, the social center of the Italian colony. Vanzetti had been drawn to Brini by his anarchist beliefs. Brini was a forceful, outstanding man, respected in the community for an integrity strong enough to overcome the suspicion of his free-thinking. For, in the pattern of immigrant groups, the Italians of Plymouth were more devout than those of the old country, their religion reinforcing their nationality in a foreign land. The Brini house was a way station for every passing anarchist. Luigi Galleani had stopped there, and big, genial, bearded Carlo Tresca, and the poet Arturo Giovannitti, and Malatesta himself, the aristocrat turned radical, with his beautiful voice. Night after night they used to sit in the Brini kitchen, talking, talking, talking of the brave new world to come. Vanzetti felt himself more a relative than a boarder in the four years he lived at the Brinis’. He was fond of the little girls, LeFavre and Zora, but their brother Beltrando came to seem almost a son to him. Vanzetti always had time for the children when the parents had none. He used to take Beltrando on walks, showing him the kinds of flowers, or in the early evening pointing out the constellations. On Saturdays Beltrando would sometimes help him with the pushcart. Vanzetti liked to listen when Beltrando practiced his violin. Though he could not read music, Vanzetti had a sharp ear for the wrong note. “Paganini” he called the boy. Although the Cordage strike had left him blacklisted in the local factories, Vanzetti stayed on at the Brinis’ taking odd jobs: carting bricks, digging cellars, building breakwaters, cutting ice, or after a northeaster shoveling snow for the town or the railroad. He continued in this casual way until the spring of 1917. * * * * * Nicola Sacco had been baptized Ferdinando, a name he sometimes used in later life, but when his eldest brother, Nicola, died, he inherited the name by which he came to be generally known. The third of seventeen children, he was born in 1891 into a prosperous peasant family living on the outskirts of Torremaggiore, an Adriatic village in the foothills of the Appenines. His father, who owned olive groves and vineyards and who had married the daughter of an oil and wine merchant, was not made conservative by his prosperity. He belonged to a local republican club. Nicola’s older brother Sabino went one step further and became a socialist. Recalled from his Dedham prison cell, those early years at Torremaggiore became a sun-drenched idyll that Sacco would sometimes describe in letters that were at the same time exercises in English: