Elizabeth Lenci-Downs is a storyteller.

And so she writes books. But when you spend time with her, you understand why she writes books. She lives them.

Her first book, I Heard My People Cry: One Family’s Escape from Russia, is a story she wrote after hearing it from a good friend, Louise Huebert Toews Gerig. Gerig’s tale is one of courage, spirit, freedom and love of family, faith and determination.

Upon her mother’s death, Lenci-Downs discovered a diary, telling her mother’s story of traveling with five friends to Yellowstone National Park in 1926. That book, Six Girls on a Hoot, is the unabridged telling of the adventure of young women traveling west in a borrowed 1924 Studebaker.

And now comes another saga, For Love of Country Il Risorgimento! (To Rise Again!).

This story is more personal to Lenci-Downs. While visiting her great grandmother in an historic hamlet in the foothills of Italy’s northern Apennines Mountains, her great grandmother passed along the legend and history of her homeland, which also is the homeland of Lenci-Downs’ father.

Lenci-Downs was only 22 at the time.

“I loved writing this book,” Lenci-Downs said. “It took many years to finish it, but it has always been in my heart.”

Lenci-Downs started writing For Love of Country soon after she finished I Heard My People Cry, some time after spending a month with her great grandmother in Italy.

She outlined the book, using notes she kept from her conversations with her great grandmother. And despite having the outline, she decided she was not mature enough to handle the intensity of the story.

“It is a work of fiction, but it is based on fact,” she said. “And many of the facts regarding Italy and its history are controversial.”

She went back to work on the book only to be stopped by her husband’s leukemia.

“He was sick for eight years,” Lenci-Downs said. “I cared for him throughout those years. During that time I wrote short stories, but I set aside my heart’s work.”

Her husband, Floyd L. Downs, a retired professor at Arizona State University, has always been Lenci-Downs’ editor.

“I count on his wisdom and knowledge,” she said. “I don’t think the book would be what it is without him. I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but I am so glad he was able to edit the book.”

Lenci-Downs has changed the book since its first publication.

“I didn’t like the ending,” she said. “It ended too peacefully. I changed it.”

She didn’t change history; she just felt the real ending could not have been like a fairy tale, and she told it in a way closer to the whole story.

“Italy’s history is violent,” she said. “Patriots fought for 15 years to try to free Italy. This is that story.”

She said the legend as told by her great grandmother is historic truth.

“Some of the action and some of the locations are fictitious,” Lenci-Downs said. “But the essence is true. I wrote it the way it was. I had to.”

The book has now traveled to Italy, and Lenci-Downs is awaiting reaction from readers there.

“It may make some people unhappy,” she said. “But I think overall it will be accepted. It is a story that needed to be told.”

Lenci-Downs was born in Virginia, Minn. Her background as an historian, educator and artist give her a full range of perspectives to use in her writing.

“I have had a wonderful life,” she said. “And I love writing.”

She and her husband celebrated 60 years of marriage in December. Lenci-Downs turns 83 in April. And she just keeps telling her stories.