When Violence Finds Love

Published on September 26, 2026 at 2:36 PM

When Violence Finds Love

Some stories take something out of you when you write them.

This is one of them.

Diva.

Because before Gina saved me, there was another dog.

And before that dog, there was violence.

Where it began

I grew up in a violent family.

My father was an alcoholic, and he regularly beat my mother.

My father's family had moved from southern Italy to Switzerland in the mid-1960s in search of a better life.

My father met my mother through an arranged marriage.

She was only fifteen.

She left Italy and came to Switzerland, a foreign country where she had no family of her own and very little protection.

Her mother had recently died. Her father—my maternal grandfather—was left caring for her brothers back in Italy.

And my mother's nightmare began.

For a short time, my parents, my sister and I lived on our own. But my father was often short of money and bills went unpaid, so eventually we moved in with my paternal grandparents, who were also living in Switzerland.

The violence continued.

My father drank.

My father beat my mother.

And by the time I was six years old, I already knew what I had to do when it happened.

Run.

I would run through our little village to find my uncle and bring him back to help my mother.

At that time, domestic violence inside an Italian immigrant family was too easily treated as something that should remain within the family.

So this became part of my childhood.

My father would hurt my mother.

And I would run for help.

Fortunately, our village was small—around 5,500 people—and surrounded by the lake and nature. I knew those streets.

A six-year-old girl running for help.

Again.

And again.

My paternal grandparents lived with us, but they did not protect my mother.

My mother was incredibly young. She worked in a factory, came home, cleaned the apartment where all of us lived, took care of her family—and endured my father's violence.

And yet, there is another truth that makes this story complicated.

I loved my grandmother.

I carried her name.

And because my own mother was so young and trapped in everything that was happening around her, my grandmother took care of me in many ways.

As a child, love and fear can live in the same house.

You don't understand the contradictions.

You simply survive them.

The sound of a key

As I became older, something inside me changed.

I stopped accepting what my father was doing.

I started fighting back.

Eventually, my grandparents returned to southern Italy, leaving my parents, my sister and me alone.

Things became worse.

There were times when my father beat my mother so badly that I was afraid she would die.

There were moments when my mother herself didn't want to continue living.

I would tell her:

“You have to stay. My little sister needs her mother.”

There is one sound from those years that I don't think I will ever forget.

A key turning in the front door.

When my father came home and we heard that key, we froze.

We didn't know which version of him was about to walk through the door.

Eventually, my mother found the courage to file for divorce.

Today that sentence sounds simple.

It wasn't.

We were immigrants from southern Italy living in Switzerland, and at that time divorce carried enormous shame within our community.

People talked.

People judged.

Friends disappeared.

Family relationships broke apart.

My mother and sister were fortunate to receive help from a couple we knew. The husband owned the factory where my mother worked.

Meanwhile, I left for Geneva to work as an au pair and learn French.

And then came another moment I have never forgotten.

My paternal grandmother—the woman whose name I carried, the woman who had helped raise me—gave me an ultimatum.

I had to do everything possible to stop my parents from divorcing.

If I didn't, she told me she would never speak to me again.

She would disown me.

I had a choice.

Her.

Or my mother.

I chose my mother.

And I never looked back.

But that choice broke something inside me too.

I had lost the woman who, despite everything happening in our home, had been almost like another mother to me.

Running farther away

Those were difficult years.

We were criticized.

We lost friends.

We lost family friends.

Eventually, after finishing my time in Geneva, I decided I wanted to go as far away as I could.

Los Angeles.

I wanted distance.

I wanted another life.

I wanted to forget.

The last time I saw my father, I was sixteen years old.

We fought.

I didn't know then that it would be the last time I would ever see him.

After a couple more years of my father tormenting us over the divorce, he eventually left us alone.

I was around twenty-one.

Then I discovered that he was dating a seventeen-year-old girl.

I felt dirty.

Ashamed.

Betrayed.

Betrayed by my father.

Betrayed by my grandmother.

And somewhere along the way, I became lost myself.

Very lost.

Imagine going from a quiet Swiss village of around 5,500 people to Los Angeles while carrying everything I had carried since childhood.

I didn't know where I belonged.

And when you don't know where you belong, it can be very easy to take the wrong path.

I did.

I don't need to tell every part of that story.

It is enough to say that I lost myself for a while.

And then someone intervened.

A friend practically kidnapped me.

She took me away from Los Angeles and brought me to her home in the San Fernando Valley.

She saved me from where I was heading.

I didn't know it yet, but she was also about to lead me to someone else who would change my life.

And then there was Diva

One day my friend told me she wanted to buy a Great Dane puppy.

I told her I had always wanted a dog too, but money was tight.

Instead, she took me to a place in Malibu.

An elderly woman lived there in an older house with two guesthouses.

She had transformed the property into a refuge where street dogs could have a second chance.

There were around one hundred dogs.

When we arrived at the gate, they all came toward us.

The woman told us:

“Just wait a little.”

So I waited.

And then I saw her.

One dog jumped onto a wooden bench.

She didn't run around.

She didn't fight for my attention.

She just stared at me.

I stared back.

Our eyes locked.

There were around one hundred dogs there.

But somehow, there was only one.

She came home with me.

Her name was Diva.

My first love

Diva taught me discipline.

She taught me responsibility.

She taught me how to love.

She taught me how to be loved.

She taught me trust.

She taught me to keep going.

Suddenly, someone depended on me.

I had a baby to take care of.

Someone waiting for me.

Someone who loved me without asking where I came from, what mistakes I had made or what had happened inside my family.

Diva had her own wounds.

I was told that she had been found on the streets of East Los Angeles with her siblings, near their lifeless mother.

She had started life with trauma too.

Perhaps that is why we recognized something in one another.

Two souls carrying things they couldn't explain.

We healed each other.

Diva became my first real experience of unconditional love.

Eventually, Los Angeles became too loud for me.

I wanted to go home.

Back to Switzerland.

And of course, Diva was coming with me.

A veterinarian in Los Angeles warned me that because of her anxiety and the trauma she had experienced on the streets, the flight could be very difficult for her.

I was terrified.

But Diva had other ideas.

When we arrived in Zurich, she came out of that travel crate as though nothing had happened.

There she was.

Ready.

New country.

New life.

Mommy Rita beside her.

Let's go.

The quiet years

We had beautiful years together in Switzerland.

We jogged beside the lake.

We walked there early in the morning and again in the evening.

Life became quieter.

My relationship with my family was never completely repaired.

We were all wounded in different ways.

There wasn't hatred.

There was distance.

There was love that had changed.

Eventually, you learn that you cannot rewrite your childhood.

You cannot change where you came from.

You can only decide what you carry forward.

And what you leave behind.

Then, in 2023, something happened.

I dreamed about my father.

I hadn't seen him since I was sixteen years old.

In the dream, I saw him.

And I waved goodbye.

That was all.

Goodbye.

When I woke up, something about the dream stayed with me. I couldn't shake the feeling, so I searched for him online.

And that was how I discovered that my father had died.

After all those decades, there would be no conversation.

No confrontation.

No explanation.

No final meeting.

Our last real memory together would remain the fight we had when I was sixteen.

But strangely, my last encounter with him in my own heart was no longer that fight.

It was a dream.

And in that dream, I didn't fight him.

I didn't run from him.

I didn't try to save anyone.

I simply waved goodbye.

Maybe that was the only goodbye we were ever going to have.

And maybe, for me, it was enough.

But there was one love that never faded.

Diva.

She was, and always will be, my first love.

When violence finds love

I never married.

I never had children.

Some people grow up with violence and go on to build the family they dreamed of as children.

My life took another path.

My family became my dogs.

And looking back now, I can see that each of them came into my life with a different role.

Perhaps those roles only make complete sense to me.

That's okay.

I am their voice.

And I can tell their stories.

Diva was the first.

She showed a young woman who had grown up watching love become tangled with fear that love did not have to hurt.

Love could be quiet.

Love could wait for you at home.

Love could walk beside you.

Love could trust you.

Love could make you responsible for another life.

Love could be safe.

A dog taught me that.

Once again, a dog saved me.

Diva left this world in January 2011.

I thought the pain of losing her would destroy me.

I promised myself I would never have another dog.

And then, six months later, Gina entered my life.

If you have read my story about Gina, you already know what I believe.

Diva sent her.

Today I look at everything that came afterwards—Gina, my pack, Ginabella, and the dogs we are trying to help—and I can trace an invisible line all the way back to Malibu.

To an elderly woman who gave street dogs a second chance.

To a wooden bench.

To one dog among a hundred who climbed onto it and looked directly at me.

And to two pairs of eyes meeting.

Maybe she needed me.

But I know that I needed her.

I wish we could erase the cruelty from this world.

I wish no child had to grow up afraid of the sound of a key in a door.

I wish no animal had to understand fear before it understood love.

We cannot erase all of it.

But perhaps we can change what happens when one wounded life meets another.

Sometimes, violence leaves wounds.