Naples ’44

Place · Town

Sorrento

Sorrento, officially Comune di Sorrento is a city and comune overlooking the Bay of Naples in Southern Italy. A popular tourist destination, Sorrento is located on the Sorrentine Peninsula at the southern terminus of a main branch of the Circumvesuviana rail network, within easy access from Naples and Pompei. The city is widely known for its small ceramics, lacework and marquetry (woodwork) shops.

In the book

One of the Bay towns at the edge of Lewis’s world, passed through on the way to and from Naples and associated with the more comfortable, touristic side of the coast.

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Appears in 7 diary entries.

  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.
  2. October 6 1943
    Arriving in a ruined, waterless Naples, the section settles into a grand requisitioned palazzo on the Riviera di Chiaia.
  3. March 3 1944
    An account of a bizarre, catastrophic Allied intelligence scheme prompted by fears that prostitution was being used to spread disease among troops.
  4. March 5 1944
    The growing, increasingly careless traffic of "line-crossers" and letter-couriers moving between Allied and German territory raises serious security concerns.
  5. March 20 1944
    Ashfall blankets the region; Lewis consults a seismologist about the risk to military installations near the volcano.
  6. April 1 1944
    A leisurely boat trip to Capri with Captain Frazer, Lola, and her friend Susanna captures a rare golden, carefree day amid the war.
  7. October 20 1944
    Official policy strongly discourages marriages between soldiers and Italian civilians, citing poor historical outcomes for such wartime unions.

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