While working at WCNY as a radio personality during the 1970s, Antonio Casale spent three years listening to hundreds of callers, complaints and stories.

It was during this time that Casale, now a part-time Syracuse University Spanish professor, met the couple whose relationship inspired his fourth novel, “Winds of Love,” which was published earlier this month.

He said they were separated in their youth only to be married, much like the main characters of his book, Felix and Espera.

“Upon that, I have expanded the story hopefully with an artistic imagination,” Casale said. He added that while he can write a book in a few months with the right tranquility and peace of mind, “Winds of Love” took Casale a year to write and was meant to be published in April 2014.

The book begins with a chapter titled “The Missing Section” that’s narrated in the first-person — though not based off factual events — and precedes the love story altogether.

In the chapter, the narrator reads a story about a dead female author who had thrown the manuscript of her own story into a fire, preventing her father from publishing the book after she died. The rest of the novel is meant to fill in those burnt pages.

“Winds of Love” centers on two gypsies who travel to Romania and steal two babies from an orphanage. The babies are delivered to Italy, and as the children — Felix and Espera — grow up, they become close friends without the approval of their respective families, Casale said.

“They hated each other,” Casale said. “It was just like ‘Romeo and Juliet.’”

Nazis take over the small Italian town where the children live, causing Felix to be taken to a concentration camp. Espera, which translates to wait in Spanish, is left behind.

“I am playing with the nomenclature here as I do all the time,” Casale said.

In the book, Felix works after World War II as a mechanic in Germany and his post-war letters to Espera are destroyed by her mother. Both assume the other is married and fall into their own unsuccessful marriages before being reunited.

Casale said if the Syracuse couple who inspired much of the story read the book, they would know it was about them.

“The skeleton belongs to them,” Casale said. “They can recognize themselves.”

Casale also said he is not sure where the Syracuse couple is today and does not plan on reaching out to them.

“The reality would be too disruptive, traumatic for them,” he said. “I refuse to get them involved.”

A natural desire drew him to writing from his 12-year career in radio and his 10-year tenure in television, Casale said.

“I had this internal impulse to write,” Casale said. “Italians have art in their DNA.”

The creativity Casale displays in the novel hardly surprises Anna Distefano, an Italian language instructor at SU who has lived in the area since the 1970s after moving from Sicily.

Casale has substituted for her Italian classes before, and in everyday conversation, she said, he shows his ingenuity.

“He is very pensive and has a way with words,” she said.

Published on February 24, 2015 at 12:12 am

Contact Rob: rromano@syr.edu