Happily Ever after Redemption

This chapter introduces two popular romance novels (romanzi rosa) by Luciana Peverelli. Published while the occupation of Rome was unfolding, La lunga notte (1944; The Long Night) and its sequel Sposare lo straniero (1946; Marry the Foreigner) treat those traumas using a hybrid form that results in arguably the earliest Italian fictional Holocaust narrative that represents the deportation of the Jews to camps and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre; unconscious of how its own anti-Semitic logic facilitates the deportation that it condemns, La lunga notte’s paradoxical treatment of Judaism aligns with dominant postwar Italian attitudes. Set during the Allied occupation, the sequel argues for the hybrid genre’s privileged position in narrating the transition back to “reality,” when the heroines become war brides, an often-vilified figure who proves an adept intercultural intermediary. Challenging preconceptions of the romance, La lunga notte and Sposare lo straniero alter the requisite happy ending for those “redeemed” by marriage.

Introduction

World War II Italy eludes easy definition. After fighting on the side of the Axis for over three years, the birthplace of European fascism experienced a series of watershed events whose political and cultural legacy is still being debated.1 On July 10, 1943, “Operation Husky” brought Anglo-American troops to Sicily’s shores, making Italy the site of the Allies’ first European occupation. In Sicily, the Allies were unquestionably occupiers; the name Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory spells out as much. Yet Italy’s status started shifting after Mussolini was deposed on July 25, a shift that accelerated following the unconditional surrender to the Allies with the September 8 armistice....

Redeeming Destination Italy

This chapter argues that the gendering of Italy as a “fallen” woman depends upon and breathes new life into a long-standing rhetorical tradition by reading U.S. military guidebooks that prepare soldiers for invasion, for the post-Armistice period, and for their Cold War friendship. Analyzing the Guide to Occupation of Enemy Territory—Italy (1943), I demonstrate how soldiers were instructed to negotiate their role as redeemers during the invasion of Sicily vis-à-vis their warnings against local prostitutes. Reading the prostitute as the guidebook’s paradigm for false, beautiful Italy, I show how redemption is positioned as a dialectic between Americanization and the restoration of “destination Italy,” an idealized site of tourism. Then, I use the postwar Pocket Guides to Italy, revised and republished periodically during the Cold War, to show how these contradictory goals play out and to what end.

Sleights of Hand, Black Skin, and the Redemption of Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle

This chapter analyzes Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (1949; The Skin), a graphic depiction of the interracial, sexual encounter between the hypersexual Buffalo soldiers and the local prostitutes on the streets of Naples. Interspersed within these spectacles, La pelle evokes the Franco-Moroccan goumiers—the accused perpetrators of mass rape after their victory at the battle of Monte Cassino. Using the historical referent to inform the allegorical reading of the “colored” soldier as “other” and “penetration” as a metaphor for the failure of redemption, this chapter argues that the racialized soldier opens redemption beyond the U.S.–Italian encounter. As the title shouts, “skin” is a major concern, yet the question of “saving one’s skin” shifts attention away from the way in which black-skinned figures insert Italians and Allies into a global network that undermines neat moral distinctions. These interracial, sexual encounters evoke the war’s interrelated colonial conflicts and the misogynist, racist logic that sustains both.

A Queer Redemption

Chapter 4 examines how the conventional gendering and sexualization of redemption is revised in John Horne Burns’s internationally beloved novel The Gallery (1947) as Naples—long described in terms of “porosity”—becomes a queer, trans-national space. The Gallery rejects the heteronormative encounter culminating in reproduction, dismissing it as the basis of a nationalistic egotism that lays the groundwork for war. Instead, the novel favors a momentary communion between Allies and Italians as the Dantean narrator’s rebirth culminates in an orgasmic encounter with a genderless Italian. Moreover, I show how the narrator’s redemption depends on a trans-national dimension that crisscrosses the Mediterranean, moving between the U.S., North Africa, and Naples, and a metonymic slippage between the Galleria Umberto I, Naples, Italy, and the universe. As it dehistoricizes Naples versus colonial Africa and materialist America, The Gallery erases all local identities, including the queer spaces and bodies that preface his redemption.

“Liberated” Rome beyond Redemption

This chapter analyzes the seminal Italian representation of the gendering of redemption in “Rome,” the third episode of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). It reads “Rome” in terms of its relationship to the novels All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), by Alfred Hayes, a Rossellini collaborator who wrote the “Rome” episode. All three texts express sympathy for the Italian woman turned prostitute, at once an individual who faces material consequences and an allegory for the nation. They position her fall at the start of a national trajectory that masculinizes redemption: for Rossellini, the northern partisans who fall to their deaths at the end of Paisà; for Hayes, the soldier tourist who returns to postwar Italy in search of pleasure. Furthermore, All Thy Conquests points to the strategic use of melodrama in “Rome.” Set during the trial of Pietro Caruso, a fascist involved in the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine near Rome, All Thy Conquestsexplicitly represents what Rossellini eschews. By focusing on the conventional gendered redemption narrative, Rossellini is able to repress the traumatic events surrounding the trial, when a Roman mob lynches Donato Carretta, a witness for the prosecution, threatening Italy’s redemption in the eyes of the world.

Epilogue

The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa D’Aquino. The diary makes a proleptic rejoinder to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. Published in the same years and set in the Campana countryside, Quel giorno trent’anni fa is also a wartime conversion narrative that tracks the transformation of the narrator from her descent into hell as a newly widowed mother of five into a contemporary Dante. However, whereas Lewis constructs his diary with an eye to establishing his authority over the events, D’Aquino does so in order to inscribe herself within them, making herself a gendered, sexualized symbol for the Italian nation and the author of her own redemption.

The Redemption of Saint Paul

This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.