New Romance Novel Takes Place At Jersey Shore Post-World War II

ASBURY PARK, NJ - Ocean Township-born Luigina Vecchione’s parents met in Rome during the second world war in a thrilling romance that took them to the boardwalk of Asbury Park. Her father, an American soldier, and her mother, a teen raised in Italy, first met at the Coliseum during the German occupation, with the pair exchanging letters for eight years before rekindling their relationship.

It’s a story that serves as the main inspiration for her debut novel, Greetings From Asbury Park: A World War Two Love Story, which was released in October.

“This particular story was spurred by my father passing away and my mother still being alive. I felt like, ‘boy, I need to get this. These stories that I grew up with just can’t go away. I need to get some form of this story of having met during World War Two,’” Vecchione, an actress who now lives in Manhattan, told Patch.

Following the passing of her beloved father, Vecchione explored writing as an alternative creative outlet to acting. It was along the six-year journey that she refined her skills for her novel, first by joining a Montclair-based writing group and later revising her work during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I learned how to write along the way, because when I’m not acting, I need an outlet for my creative juices,” she said of her independently published debut. “It took six years to write this, and then I had it professionally edited. I submitted it to 10 or so agents, but I just felt like I could do this on my own. I can have more control over it, and it’s all mine. So that's what I did.”

Through the writing process, Vecchione recalled experiences from her own childhood in Asbury Park where her family owned a restaurant through the 1960s. In preparation, she also talked extensively to her mother, pulling from those interviews as well as reading through her late father’s own recollections of his hometown.

“My father loved Asbury Park, he loved that place. He always jotted down a bunch of memories of his time there," she said, noting that her father kept pages upon pages of written entries detailing his life in the area.

“I remember looking through some old pictures and notes of his, he would take pictures of some of his comrades. I would see these pictures and then I would try to form personalities around them. And then when I really started thinking about what life was like for them so far away from home at such a young age, that’s where some of the other stories came out. I just took the little seeds of what my parents told me, and I made up the rest of it.”

Reflecting on her father's stories of post-World War Two New Jersey also led Vecchione to recall her own childhood, admiring tales of Asbury Park's Golden Age and seeing photos of music stars at her father's family-run restaurant.

“Back when my father had the restaurant, that was when the Mayfair Theater was there across the street and they would premiere Hollywood movies there, so you’d get Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli in Asbury Park,” Vecchione continued. “All the actors would come to the restaurant. My father always told us the stories of it.”

But apart from the glitz and glamour of the star-studded photographs, as well as the countless horrors faced by young soldiers such as her father during World War Two, Vecchione maintains that the core of Greetings From Asbury Park is romance and hope.

"If you're looking from a romance aspect, I think that, back then especially, you had to get married within a certain timeframe," Vecchione said. " And that's what was so beautiful about the two of them: the characters and the real people, they had dated others and they had engaged other people, but it just didn't seem right. They spent years apart before they came back together. That's how you know true love is there."

Greetings From Asbury Park: A World War Two Love Story is available on Amazon and at the Asbury Book Cooperative.