Naples '44
Reading companion of Naples'44, a book by Norman Lewis.
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.
In this project I used AI (Claude) to take the book apart and build a small website out of it. 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 to do the work.
To find out more, read the blog post Reading Naples '44 as a database
Technology
- Python and Django, published as a static site
- Claude for entity extraction
- RDFLib for the RDF export
- JavaScript for the visualisations
- Role
- Design and development
- Date
- Sep 2026 – Sep 2026
- Links
- https://naples44.michelepasin.org/
- Github Source
