Pack One Bag

June 5, 2024·36 min·2 clips

Franco sent Serena 91 handwritten letters over three months, using the code word 'tramonto' (sunset) for kisses so her father wouldn't intercept them.

1. Pack One Bag is a documentary podcast by filmmaker David Modigliani, introduced via the Family Ghosts feed, about his Italian Jewish grandparents' escape from fascist Italy and the family members they left behind. 2. David Modigliani is the creator, producer, and narrator; Willa Kaufman is his girlfriend and audio engineer on the project; Stanley Tucci serves as executive producer and voice talent; Sam Dingman of Family Ghosts served as story editor. 3. The episode's central question is: 'If fascism takes over your country, do you stay or do you try to flee — and how do you know when to make that choice?' 4. David's grandfather Franco Modigliani won the 1985 Nobel Prize for Economics; Italian newspapers called him 'the refugee from fascism' and 'our great shame because of what we did to turn him into an American.' 5. At the Nobel ceremony, Franco wore the green sash of Italian knighthood across his chest — the only laureate to add such a flourish — to signal publicly where he came from. 6. Franco and Serena met as teenagers when he pulled her into a mimosa tree on the Via Appia in Rome, climbing from his car along a branch to break off blooms and pass them through her window. 7. After an initial kiss at sunset ('tramonto'), Franco sent Serena 91 handwritten letters over three months, using 'tramonto' as a code for kisses in case her father intercepted the mail. 8. Benito Mussolini's racial laws against Jews in the late 1930s forced the couple to plan their escape; by 1938 it had become illegal for Jews to move money out of Italy. 9. In August 1939 Franco, Serena, and her family boarded the French ocean liner Normandy, which turned out to be the last passenger ship to leave Europe before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1. 10. Franco left behind in Rome his mother, his brother Giorgio, and many cousins, aunts, and uncles — a separation that lasted more than five years during which he received no direct news from his family. 11. David rediscovered his grandparents' archived love letters during the spring 2020 COVID lockdown, when his girlfriend Willa moved into his Austin, Texas home and her curiosity about his family's history overcame his guilt at having waited too long to record his grandparents while they were alive. 12. The letters showed the political situation deteriorating around Franco and Serena: Franco's professor pressuring him to follow the fascist party line, Serena noting 'anti-Semitism is getting louder and louder' and 'especially idiotic' anti-Jewish articles in the Bologna newspaper. 13. David's father Sergio, an architect with cropped white hair, had managed 19 boxes of archival family documents across two moves over 14 years without opening them, waiting for David to be ready. 14. Among the earliest finds in Box 1 are handwritten notes from Jimmy Carter ('your letter is beautiful and still pertinent') and Bill Clinton — evidence of Franco and Serena's post-war public engagement with powerful figures. 15. In Box 3, David and his father discover a 24-page typed letter from Franco's brother Giorgio — 'the famous letter' Sergio had heard of but never read — describing the Nazi occupation of Rome. 16. A translated passage from Giorgio's letter describes his family walking 'with tortured souls, soaked to the bone' through mud, children 'sensing the difficulty of the destiny that awaited us,' comparing it to 'the wandering Jew advancing in search of a refuge.' 17. David frames Giorgio's letter as 'a parallel universe, a version of what might have happened to my nonni if they hadn't escaped Italy,' prompting him to plan a research trip to Rome. 18. Willa offers to accompany David to Italy as audio engineer, setting up the series' central journey; the episode ends with a trailer of scenes — meeting the Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, finding a letter signed 'Benito Mussolini' — from subsequent episodes. 19. The episode uses dramatic reconstruction: David voices imagined interviews with his late grandparents, while Stanley Tucci voices Franco; the production includes original music by David Garza and sound design by Dan Rosato. 20. The episode resonates most with listeners interested in WWII Jewish history, family memoir, Italian culture, or anyone grappling with questions about democratic backsliding in contemporary politics.

As heard by us

A family love story becomes a searching look at fascism, memory, and the duty to remember honestly.

David turns a family love story into a harder look at inheritance, memory, and political history, revisiting his grandparents' escape from fascist Italy and the more complicated truth beneath the version he grew up with.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for coded kisses, Mussolini's letters, and a family fairy tale that turns darker the closer David looks.

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