For Liliana Adornato, Dante Falzone would happily go to the far ends of their God-forsaken earth. For Lili, Dante would go to hell and back just to tell her what the weather was like.
He would do absolutely anything for his beloved, which is why he will go all out trying to find her the absolutely perfect birthday present.
While the mob boss is aware that the church caretakers would allow their pupils two gifts a year, for their assumed birthdays and Christmases, in open defiance of their collectivist philosophy over everything else, he also knew that those were usually either some sweets baked on their kitchens or the scraps and trash that Giulia extracted with great difficulty from his and Nicola's rooms every Maundy Thursday cleaning.
While it would seem easy to top second-hand, gender-inappropriate clothing or broken toys, the platinum-haired man had considered that it was really hard outdoing the childish attachment to the simple trinkets and treasures she had cultivated all her life and still kept with great care, forged under a framework of want, and he really wanted to hit it out of the park.
Therefore, he continues to ponder, what is an appropriate gift for a newly-minted mob wife? Dresses? China? Silver cutlery? Pottery? Weapons?
He could go with the obvious: jewellery. The last time they had a walk on the shopping streets in Creta, Dante noticed that Lili had spied a complete set of earrings and a necklace at one of the fancier establishments patronaged by the Visconti, and she had thrown an off-hand comment about how she liked the intricate knotted pattern they were showing.
There were records, too. A short train ride to Rome could very well provide all sorts of pieces from Britain, Germany and beyond. She absolutely loved to listen to the operas over dinner, and her old discs were running thin from sheer usage by now.
If he was planning to go to Rome, he could also get her a new rosary, one in mother-of-pearl and blessed by the Pope himself, or even a Book of Hours, handmade and richly illuminated. She had none of those, and it would be nice to have it for her nightly prayers.
He could also go with the cliche: chocolates and flowers. Even if he did not care for those instead of her own creations, perhaps she would be glad to receive a box of Swiss or Belgian sweets, and countless times Dante had heard Lili sigh quietly over the sight of a bouquet featuring her favourite flowers, their delicate fragrances perfuming the air as her grab a bouquet to decorate the fireplace at their conjugal room.
Dante would happily choose flowers. He would pick the prettiest and most pleasantly perfumed specimens in all of Calabria. In fact, he usually does. He knows she would appreciate them any day, but he makes sure to save his most loved bouquets for birthdays and anniversaries, picking flowers that practically scream his adoration of the woman that deigned herself to be his lawfully wedded wife.
Alas, not today. Not this time. Oh, his wife would absolutely adore them, but he was not a repetitive man. Flowers were an everyday gift, and those would not do, he had to be creative about his present this time.
Dante could choose a manner of things. He could choose them all or none at all.
However, he chooses to go with a book. It had been a book his first gift, and it had been that book that brought them together during those dark times.
Heart, by Edmondo de Amicis, may very well be an unorthodox choice, but he came to learn with some surprise that Lili was such a staunch nationalist when it came to her reading habits. She had the preference of throwing herself into all the classics whenever she could find some free time between her house chores and religious and civic duties as the madam of the most traditional family in town.
That woman was a treasure trove of cultural Italian knowledge. She read it all, from Virgil to Verga, from Alighieri to Pirandello. Dante should know, as they began to actually live together in 1926, they began to trade book recommendations on his office after lunch. The criminal kingpin remembers the first one she ever gave him, The House by the Medlar Tree.
That story was about a fisherman's family from Catania, and their hardships to survive after the Italian Unification. Bleak, sad, and yet eliciting such a pride over the tenacity of people just like them.
He took it seriously, cracking it open and pouring over the words, drinking them in as if he were a man dying of thirst. He memorised her penned notes on the worn and used copy from the church library, the underpinnings of quotes in pencil then gone over meticulously in pen. He ran his fingers over the creases of dog-eared pages, doing his best not to lift the book to his nose to see if he can catch a whiff of her flowery perfume.
He read it all. He fell in love with it all. He fell in love with her.
Which is why on his wife's birthday, he does not choose cheap jewellery and he does not bother with bitter chocolates.
Instead, he gifts her the piece of literature that had him falling for her without a second thought. He hands you the very same copy; nicked from the sisters in exchange for a brand-new from Rome and a generous donation, the front cover now tatty and fading with age. Dante watches as her already-bright eyes light up with recognition and then how they fill with love, with how she realises that he has remembered it for all these marvellous years they spent together.
For her birthday, Dante could go to the ends of the earth to find you the perfect gift. Or he could go to the second bookshelf to the right, at the church library.