In 1943 a young British officer, Norman Lewis, entered a war-torn Naples with the American Fifth Army. Lewis began writing down everything that happened to him during his one-year stay, observing the complex social cauldron of a city that contrived unbelievable methods of survival on a daily basis. These notes turned into his masterpiece, a memoir titled NAPLES ‘44. Francesco Patierno's new documentary imagines Lewis returning many years later to...

As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces, Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution, thievery, and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewis's twenty-seven books, Naples '44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature. In prose...