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War in Val d'Orcia

War in Val d'Orcia

An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944

by Iris Origo, introduction by Virginia Nicholson

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In the Second World War, Italy was torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman—born in England, married to an Italian—kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo’s powerful diary, War in Val d’Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground.

At great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters, and refugees. They took in evacuees, and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them. Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity, and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion, and the devastation that war can bring.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681372662
Pages: 320
Publication Date:

Praise

Origo’s diary is a compelling story of heroism, compassion, and—in the author’s words—‘the most primitive traditions of ungrudging hospitality, uncalculating brotherhood...the shared, simple acts of everyday life.’
—Vic Sussman, The Washington Post

[War in Val d’Orcia] is a remarkably moving document that, like the best of the elemental war stories, eventually becomes a statement about the unplanned nature and folly of war.
—Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

A welcome rediscovery, evoking a unique, strange moment in civilian/soldier wartime-history with spare, vital immediacy.
—Kirkus Reviews

A remarkable war diary.
—Daily Telegraph

It is jolting to recall, through Origo's sober and self-effacing prose, the atrocious conditions of the summer of 1944.
—Financial Times

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