Naples ’44

Place · Piazza

Piazza Dante

Piazza Dante
IlSistemone · CC BY-SA 3.0

Background

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.

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In Naples ’44

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.

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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