This is the story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies: what happened to Naples when the scourge of war lashed down upon it, but also, crucially, what happened next.
The first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language fills a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war and shares a hoard of new stories – some of them truly shocking – that have never yet been published in any language.
When the Allies arrived in late 1943, Naples had already suffered a brutal German occupation and suffered reprisals from the city’s heroic resistance and uprisings. This did not save it from the merciless Allied bombing.
The city was on its knees with widespread suffering and squalor. Criminal gangs prospered, as did typhus, starvation and soaring prices on the black market. Much of the female population was forced into part-time prostitution simply to obtain food. Then Vesuvius erupted.
What happened in this city was not a mere sideshow to bigger events taking place further north, it was central to the story of the country as a whole. Neapolitans resisted Fascism just as the Florentines, the Bolognese, and the Milanese did. They suffered just as northerners did, and they longed as much for constitutional rebirth.
The heroism and sacrifice that took place in Naples were harbingers of what would later happen throughout Italy – as were the compromise and corruption of ideals that came after the Allies took control.
The Neapolitan story is the Italian story.
Naples 1944 by Keith Lowe is published on 26 September, 2024.
Keith writes more about these events in his feature for Historia.
For more historical writing, have a look at our round-up of over 190 books published his year.
