The living (and dead) “pictures” shot by Liliana Cavani
“Those were the days of the Naples plague. Every afternoon at five o’clock, after half an hour of punching-ball and a hot shower in the gymnasium of the P.B.S., Peninsular Base Section, Colonel Jack Hamilton and I would walk down to San Ferdinando, elbowing our way through the crowds that, from dawn to curfew time, thronged riotously down Via Toledo. We were clean, washed, well-fed, Jack and I, in the midst of the dreadful Neapolitan squalid, dirty, hungry, rags-clad crowd, which torrents of soldiers of the liberating armies, composed of all the races of the earth, were bumping and insulting in all the languages and dialects of the world. The honor of being liberated first had fallen to the lot, among all the peoples of Europe, of the Neapolitan people (…) after three years of starvation, epidemics, and fierce bombardment, they had accepted out of good grace, out of charity, the coveted and envied glory of playing the part of a vanquished people…”
