Naples, September 1943 – October 1944
An interactive timeline of Naples ’44
Norman Lewis was a British intelligence officer posted to Naples in the year after the Allied landings. His diary of that year — published in 1978 as Naples ’44 — is a spare, unsparing record of a city surviving occupation, hunger, the black market, bombardment and the everyday theatre of Neapolitan life. This site lets you move through the book by date.
Open the timeline →
What you’re looking at
Every dated entry in the book sits on a circular timeline. An inner ring holds Lewis’s 108 diary entries; an outer ring marks 20 events of the wider war, on the same date axis — so you can see what was happening at Anzio or Monte Cassino while Lewis was writing about a saint’s procession or a requisitioned piano.
How it was built
While reading, each entry was given a short paraphrased summary and tagged by 11 themes, 129 places, 37 recurring people, and a running list of saints, feasts and superstitions. Every one of these has its own page, and you can browse the full indexes.
Moving around
Hover or tap a point on the inner ring to read its summary and tags. Use the theme and tag filters to light up every entry that touches a subject — the evil eye, the Camorra, Allied conduct. Each entry also has its own page you can link to directly.
Browse
108diary entries 129places 37people 31saints & folklore 11themes 20war events