Naples ’44

Place · Town

Altavilla Silentina

Altavilla Silentina
Liberotag73 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Background

Altavilla Silentina is a town and comune located in the province of Salerno, Campania, some 100 km south of Naples, Italy.

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In Naples ’44

A hill town near Battipaglia that Lewis learns was shelled to rubble on the mere suspicion that it held Germans — an early instance of the campaign’s casual destruction of Italian towns.

Appears in 1 diary entry.

  1. October 4 1943
    Discharged and hitching toward newly-liberated Naples, Lewis passes through Battipaglia, devastated by Allied carpet bombing, and learns nearby Altavilla was shelled to rubble on the mere suspicion it held Germans. Further on, he witnesses desperate Neapolitan housewives publicly exchanging sex for tins of rations with American soldiers.

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