Summary of Caroline Moorehead's A House in the Mountains

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In June, the Italian government delivered a devastating report on the state of their nation. The country was corrupt, with inefficient bureaucrats and military leaders. They wanted peace, at any price.

#2 After the meeting, Mussolini was taken away and detained. He was moved to an isolated hotel high in the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome. He thought about writing a memoir about exile, like Napoleon while on St Helena.

#3 In Rome, the King asked Marshal Pietro Badoglio, hero of the Ethiopian war, to form a new, non-Fascist government. The three terse messages that were broadcast on the radio said that the King had accepted Mussolini’s resignation and that the war would continue on the side of Germany.

#4 Fascist Italy was a dictatorship that disenfranchised women, who were then considered incapable of great spiritual ideas. They were also not allowed to vote, except for once in a plebiscite to endorse Mussolini’s regime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822563292

IRB Media

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Insights on Caroline Moorehead's A House in the Mountains

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In June, the Italian government delivered a devastating report on the state of their nation. The country was corrupt, with inefficient bureaucrats and military leaders. They wanted peace, at any price.

#2

After the meeting, Mussolini was taken away and detained. He was moved to an isolated hotel high in the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome. He thought about writing a memoir about exile, like Napoleon while on St Helena.

#3

In Rome, the King asked Marshal Pietro Badoglio, hero of the Ethiopian war, to form a new, non-Fascist government. The three terse messages that were broadcast on the radio said that the King had accepted Mussolini’s resignation and that the war would continue on the side of Germany.

#4

Fascist Italy was a dictatorship that disenfranchised women, who were then considered incapable of great spiritual ideas. They were also not allowed to vote, except for once in a plebiscite to endorse Mussolini’s regime.

#5

Fascist boys were to be developed into little cocks, in coops of subservient hens. Their role was to make Italy great again, as it had been under the Romans, to save the country from Bolshevism, and to prove that it was superior to its decadent Western neighbors.

#6

Women’s roles in society were changed dramatically during the time of Fascist rule. They were expected to be feminine and submissive, but were also expected to be useful and assertive.

#7

By the summer of 1943, Turin had been reduced to penury and desolation. But the city had not given up. By nature independent, the Piedmontese had been the least swayed by Fascist rhetoric.

#8

In Fascist Italy, there were mass protests led by women against the shortages of food and fuel.

#9

Ada’s father was a fruit merchant who had immigrated from Switzerland. She was an only child, and she loved studying and music. She met Piero Gobetti, who was about to begin a law degree, and they began studying Russian together. They married and moved into an apartment in Turin.

#10

Ada and Paolo moved to another rented place in Meana, the second floor of a chalet looking directly across the valley to the steep slopes of Rocciamelone, where in winter snow cut them off for weeks at a time.

#11

The group of friends in Turin was led by Leone Ginzburg, a Russian Jew who was phenomenally well read across European classics. He spoke Italian in long, carefully crafted sentences, and had helped Einaudi start his publishing house.

#12

By the mid 1930s, the lone liberal pocket in the north was in trouble. Infiltrated by Mussolini’s powerful network of spies, many of the group had been arrested, accused of conspiring against the state, and sent off to prison or confino.

#13

In 1938, Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws that closed schools and jobs to Jews. This drew Bianca and Frida into the Resistance. They went climbing and skiing with their friends, and learned patience, persistence, and endurance.

#14

Ada was a member of the resistance in Turin, and she stayed there to share the fate of those who could not leave. She had married again in 1937, an