Naples ’44

Place · Landmark

Poggio Reale prison

In the book

The prison and its courts, where Lewis’s cases keep ending up — a German held over the mine hoax, the well-connected racketeer Fortuna expecting acquittal, petty thieves tried within sight of an open black market. It embodies the book’s sense of justice falling only on the powerless.

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

Appears in 9 diary entries.

  1. October 24 1943
    Lewis is sent to investigate whether the German soldier behind the mine hoax should be executed as a spy.
  2. January 12 1944
    The wire-theft crackdown continues to unfairly target small, desperate offenders like an elderly scrap-merchant, while real traders go untouched.
  3. 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.
  4. April 18 1944
    The black market's scale is staggering — a large share of Neapolitan income derives from stolen Allied goods, tolerated by officials at high levels.
  5. May 7 (ii) 1944
    Frustrated by unresolved banditry, the General pressures Italian police into a harsher new anti-bandit operation, which Lewis observes as an onlooker.
  6. May 9 1944
    The black market's scale and brazenness are staggering — stolen Allied goods are openly, even elegantly, advertised for sale near the courts trying petty thieves.
  7. May 11 1944
    A visit to the confident, well-connected prisoner Fortuna, who expects to be acquitted of a penicillin-racketeering charge despite Lewis's evidence.
  8. July 26 1944
    An almost novelistic assignment to escort a mysterious, allegedly dangerous female internee to Rome for interrogation raises awkward questions among the section.
  9. August 3 1944
    Lewis assesses the security risk of holding a wounded, notorious Italian saboteur in a hospital ward run by a nurse he knew previously in Algeria.

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