Stories from Naples in the spring of 1944

I am reading Naples '44* and it is one of those delightful moments when history and my fascination for Italy collide.

It’s 1944 and Norman Lewis is a British intelligence officer with the allied armies in Italy.

He landed at Salerno in September 1943 with the American 5th Army and the book chronicles a year of his life in the city of Naples.

It is a closely observed description of life after the war has moved on leaving an aftermath of broken buildings, a desperate lack of food and a breakdown of the usual conventions of morality.

So on a journey to Afragola he saw “hundreds if not thousands of Italians mostly women and children in the fields all along the roadside driven by their hunger to search for edible plants ... they had left their homes in Naples at daybreak, and had to walk for between two and three hours to reach the spot where I found them.”

But there are those vivid little pictures of Neapolitan life which I suspect had been lived out before and after his visit including the family who lived opposite his office and who “carried out a table and stood it in the street close to their doorway.  This was briskly covered with a green cloth with tassels.  Chairs were placed round it in an exact distance and on it were placed photographs, a vase of artificial flowers, a small cage containing a gold finch, several ornate little glasses, which were polished from time to time as the day passed by to remove the dust.”

And around that table they carried on the daily routines of life, from domestic chores to grooming the children, washing and eating.  There were other tables out further along the street and people called out to each other, while a man with “tiny twisted legs was carried out by his friends and propped up in a comfortable position against the wall.”

It is a scene of street life which my parents in law knew well.  Simone and Rosa were born in Naples just before Italy entered the war in 1940 and grew up in the harsh years of that war and the equally hard years afterwards.

Not that this is any rosy nostalgic account of a simple but good way of life.  For many in Naples life was a struggle lived out against a backdrop of poverty which the war made that bit more difficult and led many down darker and more brutal ways of survival.

All of this along with the horror and confusion of the fighting falls out of this book.

But so often it is the carefully observed little scenes that that draw you in, like the “two lean, hip swinging American soldiers, sharing a bottle of wine [who] passed down the street, and the two girls at the table [who] looked up and followed them with their eyes until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.”

Location; Naples, Italy

*Naples '44, An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth, Norman Lewis, 2002, Eland Publishing Ltd, http://www.travelbooks.co.uk/

Picture; from the front cover, designed by Robert Dalrymple 

War time Naples, genocide in Brazil and spying in the Balkans, stories from the pen of Norman Lewis

Sometimes without very little effort you get drawn into someone’s life which in the case of Normal Lewis was both a surprise and a pleasure.

In my case it came about in Waterstones which like a lot of people is part of what you do on a Saturday afternoon in between browsing the shops, having a meal and catching a film.

There in the travel section was his book Naples ’44 which describes his year in the city with the allied armies during the Italian Campaign. He was an intelligence officer seconded to the American 5th Army.  During the course of the year he kept a diary which became the book.

It is a closely observed description of life after the war has moved on leaving an aftermath of broken buildings, a desperate lack of food and a breakdown of the usual conventions of morality.

Not that the violence is quite over.  The Germans continue to bomb the city; there are delayed action mines which have been buried in the cellars of buildings as well as bandits, vendetta’s and the casual acts of barbarity inflicted on the civilian population.

Amongst all this there are vivid accounts of life lived out on the streets, the power of superstition and bravery and generosity of the Neapolitans.

All of which I want to return to but right now it is Mr Lewis who fascinates me, more so because his writing career stretched on in to  his 90s, which gives me hope.

So with due deference to his publishers whose account of his life I have lifted directly here is something of the story of this remarkable man.

“Norman Lewis's early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales.

Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.

He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis's masterpiece, Naples '44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.

Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.

Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of non-fiction, mostly travel books, but he regarded his life's major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in the Sunday Times in 1968. 

This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples.

He later published a very successful book called The Missionaries (1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.


More recent books included Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991), An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia (1993), The World the World (1996), which concluded his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in The Happy Ant Heap (1998) and Voyage by Dhow (2001). With In Sicily (2002) he returned to his much-loved Italy, and in 2003 his last book, A Tomb in Seville, will be published."

Picture; from the covers of Naples ’44, Jackdaw Cake and Voices of the Old Sea, courtesy of Eland Publishing Ltd, http://www.travelbooks.co.uk/

Stories from Naples, Cambridge and Varese ......

Now there is something exciting when a close member of the family decides she is going to write about her life.

Naples, 2017

And all the more so when she was born in 1940 in Naples, arrived in Britain as an economic migrant twenty years later, and then returned to Italy, bringing up a family of five in the northern city of Varese.

Rosa grew up during the tough years of the last world war and the immediate post war period when Naples was still a city where “poverty busied itself”.

Like many Italians she migrated to where the work was, but while for most that meant the great industrial cities of the north, like Milan and Turin, she travelled to Britain and worked in a series of jobs.

And she left Italy just days after she had got married, only to be reunited with her new husband later in the year when he too arrived in Britain.

I am particularly interested in how two young Italians took to Britain and to the city of Cambridge just as the “swinging “60s” burst forth, and their experiences as economic migrants, when the country was perhaps more tolerant of those who came to work here.

Varese, 2016

They stayed for nearly a decade, worked hard, bought a house, paid their taxes and got involved in the community.

But that episode was a short one, and I want to know also, about the years in the north after they returned, when Italy continued to build its “economic miracle”, and delve deeper into her life in Naples.

Both Rosa and Simone came from families who had lived in the city for generations so along the way there will be much to learn about the place.

Rosa's Easter pies, 2014

I have no experience of trawling Italian documents but I am up for it which will be a fascinating learning curve for me and I hope help Rosa.

So that is it for now.

Tina has bought Rosa one of those big diaries from a shop in Le Corti in the centre of Varese, and in time I might be able to put the story on the blog.

Leaving me with just that obvious observation, that everyone has a story to tell.

Location Italy & Britain

Pictures; Naples in 2017 from the collection of Saul Simpson and Emilka Cholewicka and Varese, 2014-16 from the collection of Andrew Simpson