Occupied Naples and the Politics of Food in World War II

European Literatures of Military Occupation

“…While reflecting upon these texts, this chapter also takes, whenever considered opportune, into account Italian discourses and the liberation paradigm. This paradigm involves considering the Allied arrival in Sicily (where the campaign and, hence, also occupation of Italy began) as a liberation from the claws of Fascism and Nazism, rather than highlighting the dynamics of the Allied occupation, which oftentimes spawned more sinister corollaries than the positive momentum of liberation would suggest (Laffin 2020;Patti 2013). As liberation was also a key term for the Italian resistance movement, the word in itself as much as the years from 1943 to 1945 also found manifold expressions in Italian literary production.…”

Oral History as a Source for the Interpretation of UBH: The World War II Shelters in Naples Case Study

“…During the interview, she proudly showed her diary and reported that during the alarms she spent her time reading by candlelight or studying algebra and trigonometry with her classmates. While considering all these differences and the fact that sometimes the interviews were in Italian and sometimes in Neapolitan, the most common words adopted were food, [54] and fear. In fact, all the children experienced a poor diet during the war, and they all connected their experience in the shelter with darkness and bombing.…”