Norman Lewis Quotes

The Italians of the South live, just as Africans do, on bread dipped in olive oil.

There are no police to deal with the thousands of squalid little crimes like this committed every day in the city.

This was the greatest invasion in this war so far – probably the greatest in human history – and the sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships, but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood.

To my surprise, definite occupation was found for me on my last visit to HQ: to investigate the motives of a clandestine political party operating in this area... Some are regarded as more purposeful and sinister including the one to be investigated, called Forza Italia!, which is suspected of Neo-Fascist leanings. My contacts in Benevento dismiss it with scorn as just another maniac right-wing movement backed by the landlords and the rural Mafia, run in this case by a half-demented latifundista who proclaims himself a reincarnation of Garibaldi.

It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city’s existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of brick.