A button sewn with fine thread on the pews of a church; a name and a date patiently carved into the marble of the walls; worn pages re-emerged from a past that now seems too distant to be understood: "Echo of stories / The skin of the marble is the guardian of the stories of the soldiers", stories that ask to be brought to light, voices of boys begging to be heard.
It is precisely in an attempt to collect and tell those stories that Yvonne De Rosa's "To my mother" was born, a collection of photographs and archival materials, a meta-narrative of what it can mean to be a young soldier, leave the dearest loved ones, fight fear, lose the childish light-heartedness and suddenly and inevitably grow up. As evidence of that lost innocence, a young soldier invokes his mother's name, hoping to alleviate his pain and soothe his wounds: «In every adversity, faced with the hardest toils, even when I felt like I was going crazy, it was enough that I would pronounce your sweet name so that I could get used to the hard fate».

The idea for this volume was born within the evocative walls of the Nunziatella Church in Naples, within which, the echo of the lives of the very young - who were formed within those walls - is still alive. In the past, many of these kids have experienced war. "To my mother" is a journey down memory lane that attempts to tell, through images, period correspondence, diaries, drawings and poems, the stories of fallen youths, «those who, unconscious but devoted, were seized by the sudden gloomy goddess; those who cruelly perished in silent vigils; those who animated by a sublime hope, in the ardor of battle, offered their lives to conquer the invoked destiny". Among them was the eighteen-year-old Achille Balsamo who died last, a few moments before the armistice of the First World War.