Is this a travel book or a war memoir? A bit of both, I would say. It was based on Norman Lewis’ diary of his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in Naples, but was not published until 1978. It is about a very specific time and place but has a hint of the universal about it. It is subtitled “An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth”, which sums up the situation the author found himself in nicely.
Lewis arrived as part of the American invasion of southern Italy. The Italians had switched sides and the Germans retreated northwards, leaving the allies in charge of the civilian population of a bomb-shattered Naples and the surrounding area.
Events of jaw-dropping random cruelty and absurdity are recounted. The occupying forces, whether American, British, or Canadian, do not come out of this well. You can imagine what happens when most of the women in the Naples area are near to starvation and will do anything for a meal. An arbitrary rule bans fishing from boats, so the Neapolitans make improvised rafts from anything they can find. Anything that can be eaten, is eaten, such as the rare fish in the public aquarium.
A booby-trap bomb explodes, killing many civilians and giving rise to a rumour that the whole city is riddled with bombs, set to explode when the electricity is switched back on. The entire population is hurriedly evacuated, but it turns out to be a German ruse to spread chaos.
Mysterious tapping sounds in the catacombs suggest that a squad of German soldiers has remained there, ready to come out and commit acts of sabotage; a search reveals nothing, and Lewis thinks that if they were there, they have been spirited away by collaborators.
The former head of the mafia gains a foothold in the new military government which quickly becomes completely corrupt. The American decision to send officers of American-Italian background looks increasingly daft, as it enables the Italian criminal elements to embed themselves.
Almost every sort of item brought in by the Americans is soon available on the thriving black market. Italians caught with illicit items that are freely available on stalls in the street are given hugely disproportionate jail sentences. The criminal gangs behind it all go free. Meanwhile, Canadian army blankets become a form of currency as they can be skilfully tailored into overcoats.
It gets so bad that essential items such as penicillin are soon more readily available on the black market than they are to the occupying forces.
Lewis witnesses the eruption of Vesuvius: “It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see”. A village is engulfed by a slow-moving column of lava, advancing at walking pace down the main street. Eventually it slows to a halt, seemingly stopped by the power of faith, leaving half the village intact.
Naples has been bombed back to the mediaeval era, thinks Lewis, and consequently old beliefs are revived. There are reports of effigies of saints in churches weeping, bleeding and talking. Is this just mass hysteria on the part of the traumatised population?
An attempt to check the spread of sexually transmitted disease is undermined by a corrupt doctor selling false certificates of health to the girls. Lewis reflects that the Italian system encourages corruption because police pay is so low. When he is posted to a village in the zona camorra he realises that it is a way of life, an established system, not quite corruption as it appears to a Briton. In this lawless region, a group of French colonial troops embark on a rampage of brutal sexual assault against the local women. They are dealt with by the men of the camorra in the time-honoured, equally brutal way.
This might sound like a depressing read, but it is not, partly because it is written in such elegant prose that you read on, fascinated. Lewis takes a slightly detached viewpoint, as his job obliged him to do.
Some of the British troops can’t wait to leave, but by the end of his year in Naples, Lewis has formed a completely different view. He has come round to a great admiration for the humanity and culture of the Italians. So much so that if he could be born again, he tells us, and choose the country of his birth, he would choose Italy.
I must declare an interest. My father was in Italy during the second world war, but a little earlier and a little further south.
I discovered this book via the Italian documentary film, assembled from existing film clips and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.
The Good Reader 