Naples, 1944: The Devil’s Paradise at War

In this trenchant study, historian Lowe (Savage Continent) investigates Naples’s descent into chaos following its liberation by Allied troops in September 1943. Withdrawing Germans—who had perpetrated massacres and shipped off thousands of Neapolitans to work camps—had demolished much of the city before they were driven out by an uprising. Allied engineers accomplished miraculous feats in restoring the city’s electricity and water service, Lowe notes, and efficiently snuffed out a lice-borne typhus epidemic by dusting the populace with insecticide. But Allied authorities, he contends, prioritized shipping military supplies to the front over provisioning the city; to feed their families, thousands of Neapolitan women and girls became prostitutes servicing Allied soldiers. Allied authorities also kept fascist officials in power out of expediency, and allowed black markets to run rampant, all of which Lowe argues left a legacy of corruption in southern Italy for decades afterward. Lowe sets his narrative against a sharp meditation on the social forces behind Naples’s centuries-old reputation as both a charming city and a cesspool of vice (“a paradise... inhabited by devils”), and his squalid portrait of wartime Naples, though punctuated by occasional heroism, is dominated by infernal imagery, with whole neighborhoods residing underground in caves to escape Allied bombing and an eruption of Mount Vesuvius blanketing the region in ash. The result is a scorching tour of a seldom explored circle of hell. (Mar.)