Nicola, Jacopo and their sister Lucia had lost their mother and were living a comfortable life under the care of their father, who was a well-known singer at La Scala. With the onset of war, tragedy struck their family. Their father was killed in the early part of the war and a bomb destroyed their home throwing the three children onto the streets.
The three children managed to survive, staying in a makeshift shelter amidst the rubble. All the three suffered from nearstarvation and cold. The boys moved incognito and earned their living doing odd jobs.
However, after peace returned to Verona, the boys came back to their beloved sister and found that she was suffering from tuberculosis of the spine contracted during the miseries of the war.
The two boys admitted their sister in a hospital promising to pay the charges for her treatment. The boys realized that to save their sister they needed a lot of money. They worked relentlessly day and night doing several jobs. They shined shoes, sold fruits, hawked newspapers, conducted tourists round the town, ran errands and made use of every opportunity available for earning money. This way, they earned quite a lot of money but never spent it on their clothes,
and food. Thus they saved all the money they could and made a regular payment to the hospital which was nursing their sister back to health. By their selfless service, they had managed to pay for her treatment for a year.
