A House in the Mountains
The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism
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3.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Dramatic, heartbreaking and sweeping in scope." —Wall Street Journal
The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the "moving finale" (The Economist) of her Resistance Quartet—the powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against Italy’s fascist regime during World War II.
In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks.
The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal.
Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Moorehead (A Bold and Dangerous Family) concludes her Resistance Quartet with an overly dense account of the role Italian partisans, many of them women, played in helping the Allies win WWII. Contending that the story of female resistance fighters has long been neglected, Moorehead focuses on four women from the Piedmont region and begins their story in 1943, when the sudden overthrow of Benito Mussolini's government in Rome led to tightened German control over Northern Italy and fomented rebellion in the region. "Fascism had trapped them in domesticity and segregation," Moorehead writes of women who joined the resistance as couriers, lookouts, and weapons smugglers, but their new lives gave them "the chance to decide their own fates." Ada Gobetti held secret meetings at her house in Turin and helped to establish contacts between Italian Resistance leaders and French and British military officials. Bianca Serra organized antifascist action committees in the city's factories and edited underground newspapers. Female partisans hoped to achieve a long list of reforms in postwar Italy, including paid maternity leave and equal wages, but their hopes were mainly dashed, according to Moorehead. She uncovers many fascinating stories, but she bogs the narrative down with secondary characters and accounts of well-known events. History buffs will wish this promising account had a sharper focus.
