War in Val d'Orcia: an Italian war diary, 1943-1944.

War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944

'THE YEAR from June 1943 in June 1944 was one of the most disastrous in the whole of Italian history,' writes the Oxford historian Denis Mack Smith in his introduction to this first American edition of Iris Origo's Italian war diary, covering the 18 months from January 1943 to July 1944, and published originally in England in 1947. In a noisy, braggart literary age, this quietly eloquent and deeply humane account is a very precious jewel, a classic of informed observation and sympathy by a writer whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities are in exquisite equilibrium. The Anglo-American Marchesa Origo and her Italian husband lived on a large estate near the lovely hill town of Montepulciano in southern Tuscany; had there been more patrician landowners like them, the old paternalistic order never would have fallen. They actually behaved as if noblesse obliged: The Marchesa had built and taught in a school for the local peasants, and her husband concerned himself with the detailed administration of the series of farms that made up their holdings. They were trusted, respected, and probably loved, as they ought to have been, to judge from this understated account of their attempts to keep their dependents alive and well in a time and place torn by treachery, death, destruction, and civil war. Among these dependents were dozens of children who had been evacuated from cities--Turin, Genoa, Leghorn-- that were being heavily bombed by the Allies, but among them also were numerous escaped Allied prisoners of war. All were hidden, fed, tended, cared for--lovingly and at great risk-- and in this solicitude the Origos and their peasants were not alone, as is attested by numerous other accounts. I have met English officers like the Major Gibson quoted by Iris Origo, who could never forget that he owed his life to the loving shelter provided by Italian peasants who had good reason to hate him: "Simple Christianity impelled them to befriend . . . complete strangers, feed them, clothe them, and help them on their way. . . . All over Italy this miracle was to be seen, the simple dignity of humble people who saw in the escaped prisoners not representatives' of a hated foreign enemy "but individuals in need of their help.' In the face of brutal reprisals against them by Nazi and Fascist fanatics, thousands of peasants nonetheless gave this aid and comfort, with no conceivable motive of self-interest. There are many riches in this marvelous book, perhaps the most unforgettable being the scene of the final march of the whole Origo household, with its sixty children, eight miles by foot over a mined road littered with corpses and constantly shelled or strafed, to the ultimate safety of Montepulciano. The spirit of a time, a place, and a people, with all its fears and exaltations, its vicissitudes, suffering, and nobility, have here been caught in luminous prose as in translucent amber. On October 11, 1943, Iris Origo wrote in her diary: "It is quite impossible to attach importance to any material possessions now. All that one still clings to is a few vital affections.' These vital affections suffuse a magnificent book.