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After several years and five drafts, they had run into a wall on a different project, an adaptation of David I. Kertzer’s 1997 book “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” a grand historical epic about an antisemitic crime perpetrated by the Vatican, set during the Italian Risorgimento.

Is she the love poet famous for “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”? The chronicler of the Italian Risorgimento for staid British readers?

In the 1920s, fascism captured Italy, in which, it has been said, the poetry of the Risorgimento — national unification achieved in 1870 — was followed by “the prose of everyday existence.”

For all my frustrations with this country, I’m an Italian patriot, obsessed by the underdog heroics of the Risorgimento in the mid-late 19th century, when Giuseppe Garibaldi’s guerrillas fought for Italian reunification against the European super-powers.

This is especially true of “Senso” and “The Leopard,” both set against the time of the Risorgimento, and also of “L’Innocente,” which takes place at the height of La Belle Epoque, which was to be destroyed by World War I.