Naples ’44

Place · Town

Altavilla Silentina

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

In the book

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.

Grey dots: other places mentioned in the same entries. Click one to open it.

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.

Wikipedia ↗ · Search Google ↗

Use ← → to move between pages