Naples ’44

Theme

Poverty & hunger

Famine, scavenging, destitution, makeshift survival

Appears in 15 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 9 1943
    Desperate Neapolitans scavenge limpets and offal for food, reflecting the extremity of the city's hunger.
  3. October 15 1943
    Introduction of Vincente Lattarullo, an eccentric, impoverished informant obsessed with justice and etiquette, who becomes a key civilian contact.
  4. October 22 1943
    Amid ongoing famine, Lewis investigates an assault on a peasant family by deserters, and is later approached with a plea for help from one of the victims.
  5. October 25 1943
    Lewis reflects on the city's collapse into near-medieval conditions — makeshift clothing, scavenging, and looting of abandoned military equipment.
  6. October 28 1943
    Asked to interpret between an Italian woman and her English-speaking-impaired British officer lover, Lewis observes how bread and supplies shape wartime romance.
  7. November 5 1943
    New contacts Losurdo and Mosca reveal the same pattern as Lattarullo: impoverished nobility clinging to grand, half-empty palazzi.
  8. November 15 1943
    Lattarullo hosts an elaborate lunch cobbled together from borrowed furniture and his one prized heirloom, despite having almost nothing.
  9. November 25 1943
    Wartime hunger drives extreme culinary improvisation, including eating storks and rumors of a manatee served at a banquet for General Clark.
  10. January 5 1944
    Lewis takes charge of security for several nearby towns, unknowingly located deep in Camorra territory, and finds poverty behind their picturesque exteriors.
  11. January 12 1944
    The wire-theft crackdown continues to unfairly target small, desperate offenders like an elderly scrap-merchant, while real traders go untouched.
  12. 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.
  13. April 5 1944
    Lewis describes the grim routine of vetting prospective war brides, most of whom turn out to be supporting themselves through prostitution out of dire poverty.
  14. August 12 1944
    Posted to Benevento to single-handedly take over security duties, Lewis finds a city devastated by an air raid and living in prolonged, near-universal mourning.
  15. August 13 1944
    A resourceful orphaned girl, Giuseppina, comes seeking a blanket — a valuable currency — revealing the precarious survival of war orphans.

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