This book is a guide to the over 200 WWII memorials throughout Italy, from Sicily to Trieste. Descriptions and directions are provided for each location.
The book's first chapter summarizes Italy's role in WWII and the two-year campaign to liberate the nation (1943-45). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on memorial sites in Sicily, where over 100,000 Allied troops landed in 1943.
Chapter 4 covers the subsequent landing of Allied forces near Salerno. Chapter 5 describes memorials in and near the city of Cassino, where German forces blocked the Allies from advancing for five months in early 1944.
Chapter 6 concerns monuments that mark the Allied landings at Anzio and Nettuno, towns just an hour south of Rome. Here an American cemetery and two Commonwealth cemeteries honor the thousands who died here or in southern Italy.
Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to World War II sites in Rome. These include the Basilica of San Lorenzo, which was damaged by bombs in 1943 and rebuilt soon after the war. Other locations include an apartment building (now museum) used as a prison during the German occupation, and the Jewish Museum, which has exhibits about the deportation of Roman Jews to concentration camps.
Chapters 9-13 describe memorial sites in or near Orvieto, Florence, Lucca, and various mountain villages. These include selected Gothic Line battlegrounds, some of which contain the remains of bunkers and trenches. Noted also are many museums and monuments to the Italian Resistance.
Chapters 14-17 focus on memorials to units of the British Eighth Army, which spent much of the Italian campaign fighting the Germans along the Adriatic coast, from Bari to Trieste. Noted also are the many Commonwealth cemeteries between Rimini and Bologna.
Chapters 18-20 offer tours of WWII sites in Bologna, towns nearby, and Trieste, where the former death camp has been made a national museum.
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