When she wrote and told us about him and sent photographs, we agreed with how gorgeous he was. My younger sister Bertha said that she had read about him and that he was usually with some tall, long-legged blond model or something. It would have made the rest of us wonder what he could see in someone ordinary like us. Andrea never gave that a second thought; she was already nuts about him and expected him to be nuts about her!

The thing was, amazingly, he was nuts about her. She wrote and told us that she saw him nearly every day, she had met his family. Then that he wanted her to give up her work and live with him in his beautiful villa high up in the hills that surround Rome. Finally we flew over to visit her, and lying at the side of his huge swimming pool, surrounded by hills and the distant tops of the buildings of Rome, she beamed at us. I asked her, “So is Marcello the Italian prince you always dreamed of?” “Oh yes, Joyce, and more, he has asked me to marry him!”

When we met him, it took us all of five minutes to realize he was not just in love with Andrea, but he adored her. He smiled every time his eyes rested on her. “There is no one like her,” he told us. “She is so full of effervescence; she is like a bottle of champagne and I could not go back to drinking wine. She drifts off on flights of fancy, and I am running behind trying to find wings to fly with her. I love her very much.”

They have been married for fifteen years and have three kids. She has seen a fair bit of the world, as she somehow always knew she would. Mainly though, she lives in her beautiful house with her gorgeous Italian. I said to her one day about all her dreams coming true and she laughed. “You have to be determined to achieve your dreams — beliefnet.com (concluded)