House In Italy

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy changed sides in WWII and the Germans, now their enemies, occupied the north of the country, an Italian Resistance was born. Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca were four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance, living secretively in the mountains surrounding Turin. They were not alone. Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies battled their way north, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators.

Edda Mussolini was Benito's favorite child: spoiled and venal, uneducated but clever, faithless but flamboyant, a brilliant diplomat, wild but brave, and ultimately strong and loyal. For much of the twenty-year period of Fascist rule, she was her father's closest confidante. Moorehead draws a portrait of a complicated, bold, and determined woman—one who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century's defining moments. And we see Fascist Italy with all its glamour, decadence and political intrigue, and the turbulence before its violent end.

The Observer newspaper once wrote of Dudley Pope that he was ‘an author who really knows Nelson's navy’, whilst the Guardian maintained he had an 'expert knowledge of naval history'. Imagine, therefore, his heightened emotions and sense of history as he sailed his yacht past Cape Trafalgar one moonlit night. Moreover, standing beside him was his wife Kay; friend, constant companion and much loved, whose support and encouragement he relied upon. Dudley Pope later encapsulated the moment in a doubly romantic dedication in his book Ramage’s Challenge, the fourteenth in the acclaimed ...