There's No Place Like Home

The sun-drenched Tuscan town of Prato was crawling with TV news crews and festooned with spray-painted banners last week, all to welcome home its most famous son: Maurizio Agliana, a hostage freed with two other Italians after 56 days of captivity in Iraq.

The three men — along with Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who was shot to death by their captors on April 14 — went to Iraq to work as security guards but were seized west of Baghdad. Italians obsessively followed every twist and turn in the crisis; in late April, when the captors demanded a protest against...