Brilliant memories of a Brit dropped in the middle of mafia land, and a mafia land that had just finished being ruled by fascists and occupied by national-socialists (or as one of the Italians in the book put it by "barbarians").

And in this case, saying a Brit is pretty much saying a protestant-values-infused northern European who is also a realist and adapts to the daily work with the Mediterranean spirit, that crazy half catholic, half moor, and half rundown-aristocratic blend that produces people seemingly pre-prepared for the hardships of wartimes but at the same time makes building any semblance of a society ruled by law&order extremely hard.

Again, the author is brilliant at writing the vignettes (orphan kids fighting for survival, the various approaches to sex for pay, the rarity of a good meal, ...) paint that quaint society pushed to the limits of survival, and how the efforts to police it could only go so far. ( )

En 1944, Norman Lewis, agente del Servicio de Inteligencia británico, llegó a Nápoles, donde las condiciones de vida eran tan precarias que los habitantes habían devorado hasta los peces del acuario municipal. Muchas mujeres se vieron abocadas a la prostitución como medio de subsistencia y la mafia se hizo tan indispensable p ara las fuerzas de ocupación que acabó recuperando todo su poder. Aun así, los napolitanos no perdían el coraje y la inventiva :Norman Lewis diría al respecto que “un año entre los italianos me ha procurado tal admiración por su humanidad y su cultura que si me fuera dada la posibilidad de nacer de nuevo elegiría hacerlo en Italia”.

This is an interesting account written by Norman Lewis, a former British Intelligence officer, of the several months that he spent in southern Italy in the immediate aftermath of the Allied invasion. Lewis has a good eye for the dissonant and the dramatic, the small details that tell a bigger story: dead cattle lying, their rigid legs in the air, in front of Classical temples; weeping blind orphan girls, drawn into a restaurant by hunger, and ignored by the diners all around them.

Yet I’m quite sure that there are times when Lewis was exaggerating or inventing in the interests of greater drama. Were there villages around Naples—“medieval” places where the inhabitants had “Neolithic faces”—where women were still forced to submit to droit de seigneur, as the author claims? Well, no: droit de seigneur is a myth with no basis in historical fact. And while Lewis does at times express empathy towards the women and girls who were sexually assaulted or forced into sex work because of the war, there’s an “oh she was lying about it being rape” story and at least one moment when he says that peasant women are just used to rape, which is such absolute bullshit. I never warmed to Lewis as a result, and while this had interest for me as a historical piece, it didn’t grab me in the way it seems to have done for others. ( )

Of special interest to me for its descriptions of Canadian soldiers in the days after the Italian campaign.

The best book about Italian culture I’ve ever read. Combine that with a book dealing with the conclusion of WWII, and that makes for an absolute winner. Finished: 24.04.2021. ( )