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 Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's support for the war, some 5,000 people turned up at a rally organized by the hostages' families. Back in Iraq, the three captives knew nothing of that, though they assumed the videos taken of them eating nice meals would be used as propaganda.

In reality, Agliana told TIME last week, the food was snatched away as soon as the cameras stopped rolling and the Italians were bound and forced to lie on the floor. Meals were limited mostly to pita bread and broth, and the men were often given only dirty water to drink, Agliana said. To cope, the three took on roles, with Salvatore Stefio's good English making him "the Leader." Agliana said he fell into the part of "the Strong One." "It's in the family DNA," he says. "I didn't ever let [the captors] see any fear. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction." The three Italians and a Polish hostage were rescued Tuesday by U.S. troops, but Agliana was ordered by Rome magistrates not to discuss his capture or liberation. The rescue raid appears to have been remarkably clean, though details are sketchy. No shots were fired, and Agliana said there were just two guards when U.S. troops arrived by helicopter.

He wouldn't respond to reports that the guards weren't armed, and there have been conflicting statements about how the soldiers knew where the men were being held. Italian newspapers speculated that the government may have paid a ransom. Calling such claims "fantasy and falsehoods," a buoyant Berlusconi appeared on news programs from the G-8 summit in Georgia to proclaim that he personally "took the responsibility" to green-light the rescue mission. Amid all the sincere relief and jubilation, some also saw political calculation in the Prime Minister's delight: his struggling government needed all the help it could get before last weekend's European Parliament polls