The web connecting Spider-Man, an Italian WWII hero and Modesto

There’s a lot of on-screen warring ahead for actor Tom Holland.

The “Spider-Man: Homecoming” star will reprise his web-slinging character in 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” and is among the stars of “The Current War,” set for release in December. (In that tale, about electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, he plays Samuel Insull, who “made cheap public utilities a reality for Americans,” according to PBS.)

And it was announced this week on Deadline.com that the 21-year-old Brit is attached to play the lead in the World War II historical drama “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” to be produced by Amy Pascal. Her credits include “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and its planned, untitled sequel.

The “Scarlet Sky” news has special meaning for Groveland resident Michael Lella. The book of the same title is a novelized telling of his Italian father’s experiences as a spy for the Allies in the final years of the war.

Pino Lella, 91 and living in Milan, has worked closely with “Scarlet Sky” author Mark Sullivan and son Michael for roughly the past decade to share his story. The elder Lella will be even closer with family when he arrives early next month to spend time with his son in Groveland and granddaughter in Modesto.

At present, a three-month visit is set, but Michael Lella said his father almost certainly will stay for good. He’s lived in the United States before, and Michael was born here.

“My father never mentioned any of his World War II stories to me as a young boy,” Lella said. “... When I was 12, I picked up bits and pieces, but nothing was whole until Mark Sullivan came in and put the puzzle together, beginning in 2006.”

The early part of his father’s story is 16-year-old Pino and his brother, two years younger, being sent to a Catholic boys school high in the Alps to escape the bombing of Milan by the British. There, the siblings are recruited by a priest to risk their lives secretly leading Jews through the mountains to safety in Switzerland.

“Then the second phase is he’s getting ready to turn 18 and will be drafted,” Lella said. A young Italian’s choices at the time were pretty much to join the Germans or the fascists, he said. If Pino had joined the resistance, the partisans, his family would have been arrested.

Joining the fascists would have placed Pino on the Russian front, his son said. Through connections with German relatives, the family was confident that if he joined the German army, he could be placed with the Todt, its military engineering group.

“So he went to boot camp in May 1944,” Lella said, and not long after was injured in a bombing raid. “Serendipitously, while he was recuperating, a German general arrived in Milan and my father became his driver.”

That general was Hans Leyers, whom Sullivan describes as “Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy ... one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.”

Leyers headed the Third Reich’s armaments and construction division in Italy, Michael Lella said. His father was recruited by the Allies to become a spy, code name “Observer,” and passed information to the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in London and Bern. With information from his father, the Allies “knew where not to go,” Lella said. “Who knows how many lives were saved?”

Why a novel and not a nonfiction account of the spy’s work?

A few reasons, Lella said. The war was a painful experience for his father, who tried for decades to block much of it from his mind.

Sullivan heard Pino Lella’s story from Robert Dehlendorf, an American businessman who met and bonded with the former spy while on vacation in Italy in the 1990s. The author traveled to Italy to meet Lella, befriended him and, over the course of a decade, returned to Milan about five times to talk further as he worked on “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” which came out May 1.

“Mark forced him to remember,” Michael Lella said, and the author – a former investigative reporter – was able to fill in many gaps through research. Through documents that had become declassified, Sullivan “was able to corroborate what my dad said.”

An April article by the Daily Chronicle in Bozeman, Mont., where Sullivan lives, says, “He first tried to write the book as nonfiction, but hit major roadblocks. Too many witnesses had died, too many records had been burned. Publishers were gun-shy after scandals over ‘true’ books that turned out to be inventions. Still, he felt it was a story that had to be told and decided to write it as a novel.”

The author told the Chronicle he estimates 90 percent of the story is real.

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 2:51 PM with the headline "The web connecting Spider-Man, an Italian WWII hero and Modesto."