Francesco D’Inverno, second right, with Ginevra, centre

ALLOW me to step just a little over the borough boundaries and into that delightful part of our city known to many as Little Italy, for there is a fascinating story to be told.

It is somehow both happy and sad at the same time – a mystery traced over 80 years.

To explain it fully we need to quantum leap back to the 1940s to find Francesco D’Inverno, a hotel worker who was part of the Italian community which had grouped around Clerkenwell, hence the neighbourhood’s lasting nickname.

His life was to change in 1940 when the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini led Italy into war alongside Nazi Germany.

In response, Italian men were to be banished from Britain under the orders of our wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.

This was how Francesco ended up on the Arandora Star ship off the coast of Ireland.

In a wartime tragedy, often forgotten beyond Anglo-Italian communities, the boat was sunk by a German torpedo and Francesco – aged just 34 – died with around 800 others.

He was placed in a grave, simply known as plot 2209 in Girvan’s Doune cemetery and dressed with a wooden cross. Those who buried him did not know where his relatives might be and the grave went unvisited for 80 years. None the wiser, his family had always thought his body had been lost to the sea.

Until this summer when all the clues identifying Francesco finally fell into place.

Scottish researchers from the Girvan and District Great War Project had appealed for help after discovering Francesco’s links to London.

They shared the story with our sister paper, the Islington Tribune, and checked around at the churches in Little Italy – including St Peter’s, where he had met and married his wife Ginevra ­– to see if anybody remembered his name.

A rocky spot in Ayrshire where Francesco’s body washed ashore

Finally they were able to put a face to the name as relatives came forward.

And now a family photo has been attached to the cross in the cemetery.

It’s a picture which includes Ginevra, who died not knowing what had happened to her beloved husband.

Charlotte Tasselli Arnold – Fran­cesco’s step-great-granddaughter – said it was a “really big shock” to discover that his body had been found all those years ago, and given a burial.

“The first we knew about Francesco being found was their phone call,” she said, adding that relatives had always been told that he had been on the Arandora Star but never found after it sank.

“We just believed that he was lost at sea with many of the others. So to hear that he was actually found was sad because Ginevra spent her whole life never knowing – but obviously there was just so much comfort in the fact that he was actually laid to rest and he had a Catholic service. It completely changed the ending to the story.”

Doris Tasselli, 94, who married Ginevra’s son Alfredo, told her granddaughter that if Ginevra had known her husband’s body had been found and buried, she would have been “over the moon” and “she’d have been straight up to Scotland to visit him”.

Instead, the widow was left with unresolved feelings.

Ms Tasselli Arnold said: “It’s just so sad. My grandmother said Ginevra would always talk about Frank and it was clearly something that she never, ever forgot about and there was never any real sort of closure for her.” She added that now the family has finally “got that sort of closure for her” – it was a “happy, sad story”.

Ritchie Conaghan, from Girvan and District Great War Project, said they had received dozens of emails about Francesco from across the country before they tracked down the family through the use of online search engines and support from the public.

Mr Conaghan, who has researched the deaths and final resting places of hundreds of servicemen, said Francesco’s story had been “abso­lutely mind-blowing”.

“We’ve been doing this for a long, long time and researched hundreds and hundreds of guys but I can honestly say this has been the best journey that we’ve been on,” he added.

“There was tears on many, many ­levels.”

Ms Tasselli Arnold added: “We want to go up to Scotland and visit all together to give a sort of blessing to him and do it on behalf of Ginevra because, obviously, she never got to do it.

“And, you know, that’s what she would have wanted. We’re just completely overwhelmed by it.”