The Girl on the Via Flaminia

Living off and on in Italy for more than twenty years, I’ve been struck by Italians’ ambivalence toward Americans. On the one hand, they credit us with liberating them from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. On the other hand, they blame us for the harm that the preferred US strategy—aerial bombardment—caused to civilians and the sometimes high-handed and racist policies of the Allied occupation.

I was fascinated to find this deep ambivalence captured so well in Hayes’s novel, ostensibly a love story of a lonely US soldier and a destitute Italian woman displaced to Rome by the bombing of her native Genoa.… show more.