Naples ’44

Place · Piazza

Piazza Dante

Piazza Dante is a large public square in Naples, Italy, named after the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. The square is dominated by a 19th-century statue of Dante, sculpted by Tito Angelini.

In the book

The square at the top of the Via Roma that Lewis uses to measure the city’s mental distance from the countryside — its cafés are ten miles and a thousand years from the Bronze-Age world of Afragola. Its Café Savoia is a haunt of line-crossers, and an old woman stops him near here trying to sell her daughter.

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Appears in 4 diary entries.

  1. February 12 1944
    Lewis reflects on the cultural gulf between cosmopolitan Naples and the archaic, vendetta-bound countryside just miles away, as seen through Lattarullo's ignorance of it.
  2. March 5 1944
    The growing, increasingly careless traffic of "line-crossers" and letter-couriers moving between Allied and German territory raises serious security concerns.
  3. March 26 1944
    Amid desperate poverty, Lewis is confronted by a mother attempting to sell her young daughter for sex — a stark instance of wartime destitution.
  4. June 7 1944
    Lattarullo's improvised income as a professional "mourning relative" at funerals picks up again with the fall of Rome, complete with a rented car and driver.

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