Books like The Secret of Santa Vittoria

After visiting some of the hilltowns in Tuscany, I wondered what it would have been like to live through WWII there. Based on a true story and the author 's personal experience, the book clearly told the story of one small village and their ordeal. It was light and humorous, insightful and introspective, and the narrator was excellent! In my mind I placed the book in Montepulciano, the heart of wine making country and a town with many of the same characteristics as the one in the book. The characterization of the townspeople was spot on; they came alive, as did their German occupiers.Quite a gem!From The Independent: They thus missed the book's remarkable strengths: its versatile depiction of characters, its unpretentious but subtle prose. Based on the true story of an Italian village that hid its wine from occupying German forces, and probably derived from Crichton's own experiences as an American infantryman fighting his way up Italy, The Secret of Santa Vittoria painted a rich tableau of foreign life for notoriously parochial American readers. Comic, occasionally mawkish, the novel can still veer sharply away from excessive sentimentality. Having bamboozled the dozy occupying Germans, for example, the village's inhabitants find a different treatment in store when a crack Wehrmacht unit retreats through their town:They never looked at us. They moved through us with the assurance of men who know that if so much as one shot was fired at them by some Renaissance fighter, they would burn the town to the ground.