Naples 1944
The Devil's Paradise at War
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning author Keith Lowe's newest critical deep-dive into the history of Naples during WWII.
Keith Lowe has chronicled the end of WWII in Europe in his award-winning book Savage Continent and the war’s aftermath in the sequel, The Fear and the Freedom. In Naples 1944, he brings readers another masterful chronicle of the terrible and often unexpected consequences of war. Even before the fall of Mussolini, Naples was a place of great contrasts filled with palaces and slums, beloved cuisine and widespread hunger. After the Allied liberation, these contrasts made the city instantly notorious. Compared to the starving population, Allied soldiers were staggeringly wealthy. For a packet of cigarettes, even the lowest ranks could buy themselves a watch, a new suit or a woman for the night. As the biggest port in Allied hands, Naples quickly became the center of Italy’s black market and has remained so ever since. Within just a few months the Camorra began to re-establish itself. Behind the chaos and the corruption, there was always the threat of violence. Army guns were looted and traded. Gangs of street kids fought running battles with the military police. Public buildings, booby-trapped by departing Germans, began to explode, seemingly spontaneously.
Then in March 1944 - like an omen - Vesuvius erupted. Naples was the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies. What they found there would set a template for the whole of the rest of Europe in the years to come. Keith Lowe’s Naples 1944 is a page-turning book about a city on the brink of chaos and glimpse into the dark heart of postwar Italy.
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In this trenchant study, historian Lowe (Savage Continent) investigates Naples's descent into chaos following its liberation by Allied troops in September 1943. Withdrawing Germans—who had perpetrated massacres and shipped off thousands of Neapolitans to work camps—had demolished much of the city before they were driven out by an uprising. Allied engineers accomplished miraculous feats in restoring the city's electricity and water service, Lowe notes, and efficiently snuffed out a lice-borne typhus epidemic by dusting the populace with insecticide. But Allied authorities, he contends, prioritized shipping military supplies to the front over provisioning the city; to feed their families, thousands of Neapolitan women and girls became prostitutes servicing Allied soldiers. Allied authorities also kept fascist officials in power out of expediency, and allowed black markets to run rampant, all of which Lowe argues left a legacy of corruption in southern Italy for decades afterward. Lowe sets his narrative against a sharp meditation on the social forces behind Naples's centuries-old reputation as both a charming city and a cesspool of vice ("a paradise... inhabited by devils"), and his squalid portrait of wartime Naples, though punctuated by occasional heroism, is dominated by infernal imagery, with whole neighborhoods residing underground in caves to escape Allied bombing and an eruption of Mount Vesuvius blanketing the region in ash. The result is a scorching tour of a seldom explored circle of hell.
