The Adoption

Episode 31: The Adoption — Fido, the “faithful” Dog from Borgo San Lorenzo.

The Adoption brings listeners into a quiet wartime story set in a small Italian community, where an injured stray is taken in by a working family and learns the meaning of home through ordinary acts of care.

Long before the name Fido became synonymous with extraordinary devotion, he was simply a small, mixed-breed dog rescued in 1941 by Carlo Soriani, a brick-kiln worker from Luco di Mugello near Borgo San Lorenzo. Their life together was shaped by a simple daily ritual: a departure, a familiar route, and an evening return.

This is not only the story of a dog waiting at a bus stop. It is the story of Fido: a life defined by rescue, attachment, loss, and a loyalty so enduring that he returned to the same place for roughly fourteen years after Carlo Soriani was killed in a 1943 bombing. In time, the town honored Fido with a medal and a monument—an enduring tribute to a bond that outlasted absence

In Borgo San Lorenzo, Fido is remembered not as a symbol invented after the fact, but as a presence the town itself watched day after day.

After Carlo Soriani was killed in a wartime bombing in 1943, Fido continued to return to the familiar bus stop where he had once greeted him after work. He waited for roughly fourteen years, until his own death in 1958. The town honored him during his lifetime with a medal and later placed this bronze monument in Piazza Dante, inscribed in Italian: “A Fido, example of fidelity.”

The statue matters because it turns an intimate act of waiting into a public memory. Fido could not understand war, air raids, or death in the human sense. What he understood was the rhythm of a shared life: someone left, and someone always came back. When that return stopped, he kept faith with the place where love had taught him to wait.

Image Credit

Monument to Fido, Borgo San Lorenzo, Tuscany, Italy. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.