Apparently. "When American and British troops liberated Naples on October 1 1943, they entered a morally and physically devastated city. It was like something out of Dante's Inferno. There was neither electricity nor gas; nor even water, as the retreating Germans had blown up the city’s aqueduct. The port, the second largest in Italy, had been destroyed by relentless Allied bombing. There were no trains, buses, cars or emergency services. Banks, courts and schools were closed. The police were ineffectual, the government gone. Corruption and prostitution were endemic, as were the mafia and the black market. The first Allied governor of the city, Col Edgar Erskine Hume, wrote in December 1943: “At the time of our arrival the city was in darkness. [...] Food was practically unobtainable and people were starving… Despair was everywhere.” Keith Lowe, author of Naples 1944, writes rather grandiosely that this book is “the first major history of wartime Naples” in English, and so fills a “glaring gap” left by British and American authors who have failed to “dig any further” than the accounts already published. These include Naples 44, the great travel-writer Norman Lewis’s account of his time in the city during its liberation. Lewis served as an intelligence officer in the field security service; Naples 44 is a masterclass in the observation of people and place. It isn’t clear why Lowe feels such a burning need to dig deeper. For much of the first part of this long book, he appears reluctant to spell out where he’s coming from. Eventually, however, his head does rise above the parapet. His mission, it emerges, is to brand the Allies as guilty, not just of making the desperate plight of Neapolitans worse, but of playing a pivotal role in the additional disasters that would strike them in the decades that followed the war. These days, of course, it’s fashionable to denigrate dead white men and all their works, especially in America and Britain. But to blame the Allies, who sacrificed so much blood and money to liberate Italy and Europe, for such a litany of tragedy? Frankly, it’s surreal." How absurd to say the Allies ruined Italy – they saved it (msn.com)
Italian politics were certainly frisky when I was there ('72-'75). One of our guys was ... treated badly ... when he wore a long black coat too close to a socialist rally. Evidently that was the mark of a Nazi. Or it could be that Italian politics are just plain nuts at any time. Prolly that.
