[LouCoatney]

Zio was an Italian Navy veteran. I believe he lived in Genoa. He had a sailboat, which is one of his paper models. He had the companionship of a beautiful Italian lady. He had friends in the Italian Navy who were officers, I believe, but he seemed to be on very minimum income.

Originally, he cast lead models of WW2 Italian warships. On his now-archived webpage you can find paper models of aircraft and even 2D figures for simple wargames.

I thought he had died and posted that somewhere, but he contacted me and said he hadn't died. I urged him to produce reduced versions of his paper model ships at the more prevalent 1:700 scale.

And then he died, very sadly. I hope it wasn't from lead poisoning. I don't know if he/they had any children.

You are doing good work, Ed. I've started colorizing my own models, some of which are on my CoatneyHistory webpage.

I actually originally got into paper model ship design to do the Italian warships which no one was doing in plastic. (WHY did Italeri do the German pocket battleships and the early version of the Hood instead at 1:720??)

Manually, I did the Soldati class destroyer and Conte di Cavour battleships and with CAD I've done the navigatoris, d'Abruzzi/Garibaldi light cruisers, and the reconstructed battleships, but I haven't converted them to .jpg/.png ... designing games mostly.

I have a Facebook wargamer friend on Malta, Vincent Baldacchino. Do you know him?

And now I must go out for my heart walk, up here in Norway's ice and snow.