A HOUSE IN THE MOUNTAINS

THE WOMEN WHO LIBERATED ITALY FROM FASCISM

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £20

Between September 1943 and May 1945, three wars were being fought in Italy: the war between the Allies and Germany, a civil war between Fascists and their enemies, and a revolutionary uprising. ‘In Caroline Moorehead’s book three plaited narratives track these various wars’ progression,’ wrote Lucy HughesHallett in the Times Literary

Supplement. ‘Her book seems at first like a celebration of women’s audacity, and of all the partisans’ heroism, but she is too fair and subtle-minded a historian to leave it there. After the liberation, partisan reprisals were almost as ruthless as those of the Fascists had been.’ Moorehead tells her story, as

Guardian reviewer Tobias Jones explained, ‘through the intersecting lives of four female friends in Turin who became staffette (couriers) in the resistance, delivering intelligence, letters and weaponry: Bianca (a communist law graduate and factory agitator); Silvia (a doctor); Frida (a literature graduate); and Ada (the widow of the anti-fascist Piero Gobetti)... Their transformation from studious, dutiful daughters into daring, scruffy, exhausted combatants is brilliantly and subtly told... The narrative is told with such verve that I frequently had goosebumps: the men and women known from much drier history books come alive, only to be captured, tortured and killed.’

Reviewing it for theartsdesk, Boyd Tonkin found the book to be ‘crammed with dramatic and often horrifying incident’, but pointed out that ‘Moorehead’s quartet of heroines all lived; indeed, the radical lawyer Bianca Guidetti Serra only died – aged 95 – in 2014. They left the diaries, the letters, the documents and the family memories that have allowed her to tell their eye-opening and spirit-lifting stories so powerfully.’