Naples '44 is Lewis's diary from the year he spent as a British intelligence officer in Naples, from the Allied landings of September 1943 to October 1944. It's also one of the best things I've read about what military occupation looks like from street level. Hunger, the black market, bombs, and in between all of it the ordinary theatre of Neapolitan life: a saint's blood that has to liquefy on schedule, a requisitioned piano, the city aquarium emptied to feed an official banquet.
So I decided to take the book apart and build a small website out of it: naples44.michelepasin.org. Partly to hold on to what the book is about, as an interactive index I can come back to. Partly as a test of how far I could get using AI (Claude) to do the work.
For more details, see also the blog post Reading Naples '44 as a database
Date: Sep 2026 - Sep 2026
Link: Project website & interactive visualization
Link: Github Source
Screenshots:
