The story of the liberation of Naples, of one of the most morally ambiguous moments in the history of the Second World War. Naples 1944 is a powerful and eloquent evocation of a city and a people living at a time of great violence and turmoil.

The Second World War destroyed countless cities in Europe and Asia. Naples 1944 is the story of one such city. It describes not only what happened to Naples when the scourge of war lashed down upon it, but also, crucially, what happened next. The aftermath of the Second World War was often just as dramatic, exhilarating and traumatic as the war itself; and yet it is rarely written about by historians, and almost never acknowledged in our public memory of the war.

This is the first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language. It fills a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war, and shares a hoard of new stories – some of them truly shocking – that have never yet been published in any language.

Lowe’s gripping and powerful book places Naples right at the heart of Italian history. What happened in this city was not a mere sideshow to bigger events taking place further north, it was central to the story of the country as a whole. Neapolitans resisted Fascism just as the Florentines, the Bolognese, and the Milanese did. They suffered just as northerners did, and they longed as much for constitutional rebirth. The heroism and sacrifice that took place in Naples were harbingers of what would later happen throughout Italy – as were the compromise and corruption of ideals that came after the Allies took control. Naples 1944 shows that Neapolitan story is the Italian story.