This is very much not a carefree romp through the Italian countryside, the sort of pasta and vino fuelled travel book that’s long on descriptions of sunsets, rustic beauty and poor but noble locals. It does not end up with the Brit, after a series of hil-arious misunderstandings, being accepted by the local community and becoming a central feature of the village.

Nor is it a jolly war memoir, with suffering being described as having to drink cocktails warm among the pesky shelling and giving jerry a bloody nose despite HQ not being able to find their own arses with a flashlight, a compass and troop of commandos leading the way.

Instead it’s a bloody grim portrayal of what happens to a civilian population during military occupation, which is essentially that they end up like a butterfly crushed to the track of a panzer tank; battered, buggered and with its fortunes linked to the fate of a force much greater than itself.

What makes this book so very special though, is that it’s set in Naples. There’s misery, there’s starvation, there’s subjugation, there’s humiliation, there’s brutality and ugliness on a grand scale and any innocents are minced in the process, there’s corruption and theft and murder and horror upon horror. Then, World War II happens and things get even worse.

The book is put together from the diary that the author kept when he was stationed in Naples. The ’44 referred to in the title is 1944 but, from the descriptions of the Naples lifestyle, it could have easily of been 1744 and, based on my fleeting recent visit there, I suspect the city is probably going to be the same way in 2044.

There’s a certain type of character developed by people who live on top of an active volcano. Suspicious, superstitious and volatile in the extreme. Lewis describes Naples as the world’s largest village, made up of a lot of little villages where everyone knows each others’ business. Even the war and mechanised killing on a grand scale does little to detract the locals from the busy business of feuds, vendetta and organised crime.

Books about the war in foreign places are like guide-books for time travellers and, like any guide book, it’s interesting to compare your views with that of the author. OK, so there’s typhoid, air-raids and fascism, but I suspect that Naples is, was and will be like that in whatever ’44 you visit it in. The book describes sometimes rather grim happenings, but this is war, things are grim, and this is Naples, things are very grim. Then Lewis is posted to a nearby small village in the mountains and things get exceptionally grim.

I was in Naples for less than an hour in 2008. The first half hour was the taxi-ride from the airport to the hydrofoil port, the second half hour, some days later, was the taxi ride from the hydrofoil port to the airport. I was only passing through and so had not really read much about the city, so I was quite surprised that a place like this existed a) in Europe and b) outside of a movie set a hundred years after the apocalypse. As the cars raced through the streets side to side and bumper to bumper at one speed: too fast, I pressed my nose into the back of the front passenger seat and inhaled the dead scent of a million spent cigarettes. This was far fresher than the air coming through the taxi window.

There are some fabulous absurdities; because this is abroad after all and some of the customs are strange (professional mourners pretending to be from Rome and hence lending an important touch of class to the proceedings) and there are the absurdities of war (landing mounds of equipment on the beach, not guns or tanks but filing cabinets and typewriters).

This is a very honest book. It makes one wonder how people can survive and even thrive in such a hostile environment. It’s about the war sure but more than that it’s about the people of this city by the volcano and I suppose, what it takes to survive through war and eruptions. ( )