Starving street urchins sell their sisters in the chaos of Naples, 1944

Naples is ‘certainly the most disgusting place in Europe’, judged John Ruskin. The boisterous yelling in the corridor-like streets and beetling humanity filled the Victorian sage with loathing. (‘See Naples and die’ became for Ruskin ‘See Naples and run away’.) In the city’s obscure exuberance of life he could see only a great sleaze. Naples still has a bad name. Tourists tend to hurry on through to visit the dead cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or jet-set Capri, renowned for the debauched excesses of Tiberius. Naples may lack the monumental grandeur of Rome, but visiting it constituted the gracious end to the Grand Tour during the 17th and 18th centuries. Naples, one-time Arcady of Bourbon kings and queens, has seen better days.

When the Allies arrived in the city in late 1943 in the wake of the German retreat they found a shell-pocked architectural magnificence shadowed by pickpocketing crime and downright miseria. The spectacle of child prostitutes and urchins on the make shocked many British soldiers. Norman Lewis was a military intelligence officer stationed there at the time. Naples ’44, his revered diary-memoir, evoked a Mediterranean outpost maudlin with nostalgia for the mandolin and the knife. Though he often embellished or transmuted his impressions into something approaching semi-fiction (only Lewis could convey so vividly the heady liquid softness of a Neapolitan evening or the tatterdemalion allure of the city’s Spanish Quarter), his book remains the great journalistic account of Neapolitan suffering and survival in wartime.

Naples 1944, Keith Lowe’s history of the nine-month Allied stewardship of the city, quotes Lewis and shares his indignation at the presence of underage prostitutes and other black-market depredations. But, unlike Lewis, Lowe is at pains to distinguish truth from invention. One of the abiding myths of Allied-occupied Naples is that tropical and other fish from the municipal aquarium were boiled up in a variety of pasta dishes, owing to food shortages.