American Naples: Cross-Cultural Memories of an Occupation

On October 1, 1943, at 9:30 the Allied Fifth Army entered Naples and established a military government that lasted until January 1, 1946. Yet, while the Allies where slowly advancing toward Naples, suffering heavy losses, the Neapolitans rose up against the occupying Nazis and their Fascist fellow citizens and liberated their city. In contemporary representations of those few days, the clash of perspective could not have been stronger: Allied media used phrases such as “the capture of Naples,” “the take of Naples,” “the fall of Naples,” while Italian leaflets and improvised independent journals reported about the “liberation” of the city, a term soon embraced by the Allied sponsored media for obvious reasons. The history of the liberation of Naples soon ossified in epic tales of street revolts or in folkloristic vignettes of the interactions between Neapolitan civilians and Allied soldiers. The talk analyzes the ways in which some of these tropes emerged and, at the same time, shows how a broad range of positions was obscured rather than explained by the categories liberation/occupation.