Italy Mountains

At the start of World War II, the US Army had two cavalry divisions - and no mountain troops. The German Wehrmacht, in contrast, had many well-trained and battle-hardened mountain divisions, some of whom by 1943 blocked the Allied advance in the Italian campaign. Starting from scratch, the US Army developed a unique military fighting force, the 10th Mountain Division, drawn from the ranks of civilian skiers, mountaineers, and others with outdoor experience.

Montenero Val Cocchiara is usually referred to simply as Montenero, or Mundunur in the local dialect. It is a typical mountain village on the border of Italy’s Abruzzo and Molise regions, but Montenero is more than that. Certainly the village and its people retain unique traditions and character traits because of its relative seclusion. At the same time—as fully revealed in this book—its history was tinted by contacts with numerous powerful groups over many centuries. Since Naples was the political and cultural heartbeat of south Italy, it sewed threads that tie Montenero to a ...

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women - Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca - living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators.

In 1897 the young Italian peasant Giuseppe Musolino was falsely convicted of a crime and sentenced to 21 years at hard labor. He soon escaped, and began hunting those who had played a role in his false conviction, extracting an ominous and lethal revenge, killing as many as 25 people. For three years he eluded a massive manhunt conducted by hundreds of police and even a full regiment of the Italian army. He soon became a hero to the common people of southern Italy, who risked imprisonment themselves to hide, protect, and sustain him.

Foreign correspondent Christine Toomey spent years renovating her glorious, long-abandoned hill-top home in Le Marche, Italy, as a haven of rest from covering crises around the world. But in 2016, the peace and beauty of this beloved landscape were thrown into chaos when a series of powerful earthquakes struck the heart of the Apennines. Wracked with grief for a place still reverberating with seismic aftershocks, Christine set out on a journey of discovery through the history of a landscape that gave birth to so much of Western culture and civilisation.

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy changed sides in WWII and the Germans, now their enemies, occupied the north of the country, an Italian Resistance was born. Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca were four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance, living secretively in the mountains surrounding Turin. They were not alone. Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies battled their way north, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators.