Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) is a quirky figure in the annals of Italian Fascism. An extremist who pushed Mussolini towards declaring himself dictator on 3 January 1925, he had the classic background of bemedalled service in the First World War. Thereafter a writer and journalist, he spurred Mussolini towards revolution in Italy, founding a journal entitled La Conquista dello Stato (‘The Conquest of the State’). By 1933, too individualist to suit Mussolini’s rule, he was relegated to confino, the Fascist punishment of banishment to out-of-the-way places in the south of Italy. It was said that Malaparte’s real sin had been to begin a relationship with the widowed daughter-in-law of Giovanni Agnelli, the wealthy (and patriarchal) founder of Fiat. However, Malaparte soon returned to journalism and in the Second World War became a celebrated war correspondent for Corriere della Sera. In 1944 he punchily portrayed his wartime experiences in Kaputt, a teasingly unreliable memoir which includes a description of a naked Himmler in a sauna bath. When the Allies occupied Italy, Malaparte sloughed off his Fascism and began working for the American army in Naples. In 1949, he sketched a scabrous account of the city’s ‘liberation’ in a novel entitled La Pelle (‘The Skin’), which describes the pressure on the city’s women to satiate the desires of the occupying soldiers. 

Malaparte appears in Keith Lowe’s passionate but idiosyncratic book on post-Fascist Naples without much in the way of an introduction. Turning its pages, we discover that Lowe has a deeper sympathy for the Neapolitans of 1943–4 than Malaparte, while sharing his sense of outrage. Chapter ten, containing his own account of the sex trade in the city, is the longest in the book. Lowe reports that around 10 per cent of Neapolitan women were engaged in some form of sex work and that 74 per cent of white and 96 per cent of black GIs slept with Italian women during their military service.

Lowe’s book has a three-part structure. In the first section, archly entitled ‘Beautiful Monsters’, he describes the Allied takeover of the city in 1943–4. He plunges into his narrative with little attempt to set out the historical background or discuss the theory and practice of the Fascist government. Most of