Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Italy
Nearly killed by a German bomb, Pyle faced the fear and frustration known as “Anzio anxiety” among the American soldiers trapped with him on the beach.
An American widow encountered Hitler and Mussolini during a world-wide art tour in the years before war broke out.
“Hitler looked cold and ordinary and Mussolini warm and expansive,” Mrs. Gifford later recalled.
Disconsolate and recently widowed, Marguerite Gifford penned a poem in 1937, summing up: “My thrill in life, has ceased to be... my husband will not come to me.”
Allied soldiers struggled for months to clear veteran German troops dug into the mountains of northern Italy in late 1944 and early 1945.
Seventy-five years ago, Allied soldiers made a daring amphibious landing behind German lines and were soon surrounded in what would become one of the toughest battles of World War II.
Alexander Graham Bell traveled to Italy at the turn of the 20th century on an audacious mission to rescue the remains of the man whose legacy endowed the Smithsonian Institution.
Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmas season of 1903 in the festive tradition. On the contrary, the inventor of the telephone passed the holiday engaged in a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, and the opening of a moldy casket.
How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all
Our platoon was probably the only group of Allied soldiers to witness the final degradation of Mussolini.
In December of 1942, I was drafted and sent overseas to Oran, Algeria, where I was assigned to the 91st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. The eyes and ears for the troops, we rode in jeeps, armored cars, and light tanks, scouting the numbers and supplies of the enemy forces.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY U.S. CITIZEN WHO HASN’T FALLEN UNDER THE CITY’S SPELL.
The great tenor came to America in 1903, and it was love at first sight—a love that survived an earthquake and some trouble with the police about a woman at the zoo
WHEN, ON COLUMBUS DAY OF 1980 , the operatic superstar, Luciano Pavarotti, sitting on a bay horse, his massive bulk arrayed in fancy dress, jounced up New York’s Fifth Avenue at the head of the annual parade celebrating the discovery of Am
“For This Challenge, I Had Come Three Thousand Miles and Thirty-six Years of My Life”
Would the great fighter come over for the Union? Italian freedom and lead troops Lincoln hoped so
In the summer of 1861, when the newspaper generals in New York clamored for a clash of arms to put down the Confederate rebellion, the battle and the recriminations came sooner than expected.
It was the most devastating enemy surprise attack since Pearl Harbor—but what mysterious affliction were people dying of two days later?
The port of Bari, Italy, was crowded on the afternoon of December 2, 1943, when Captain Otto Heitmann returned to his ship, the John Bascom , with the two thousand dollars he had drawn from the U.S.
The Allied drive toward Rome had stalled. Was the destruction of a historic monastery justified in an effort to break the German line and get the campaign moving again?
Halfway between Naples and Rome, on a mountaintop and visible for miles, stands the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, serene and benign, apparently indestructible.
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