Free Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel

the Monuments officers became Hammond’s enduring legacy. Each miscue provided invaluable information about what to do differently once Allied forces reached the Italian mainland and began the push northward. Hammond’s acute skills as an observer not just of the process but of people—the local population and Italian officials, his fellow officers, and the average GI—and his ability to articulate the improvements that would be required in the months ahead, would ease the burdens of each Monuments officer who followed.
    The most significant monuments of Sicily largely survived the Allied invasion and subsequent battles. Considerable bombing and occupational damage occurred in Palermo, but the raids claimed a far greater toll on the Baroque (and, by consequence, more delicate) churches of Palermo than those built hundreds of years earlier. The Cathedral of Messina lost its roof, but at least it wasn’t the original, which had already been rebuilt in 1908 after a devastating earthquake. Sicilians naturally lamented damage to even a single church, but Hammond and the other Monuments officers knew it could have been so much worse.
    The battle for Sicily paled in comparison to the potential carnage that would accompany an Allied invasion of Western Europe, as Hammond explained in a September letter to his wife:
    One has the ever present spectacle of a ruined city and one multiplies it by so many cities in Europe and it seems as though the task of reconstruction would never be done. And the loss of works of art is irreplaceable—beautiful churches gutted, archives buried under rubble, libraries exposed to weather and theft. . . . this work seems so much more important and so hopelessly immense. And singlehandedly I feel like the seven maids with seven brooms even in my little corner. . . . it would certainly help us if the rest of the country would give in without a battle.
    BY AUGUST 17, after thirty-eight days of continuous fighting, the Allies claimed victory in Sicily, bringing the war to the Reich’s back door. Most of the German forces had by then evaded capture, having crossed the Strait of Messina onto the Italian mainland. Even while Marshal Badoglio reiterated Italy’s ongoing commitment to Nazi Germany, his emissaries secretly engaged the Allies in surrender discussions being held in Portugal. But Hitler, following his earliest instincts that it was only a matter of time before Italy double-crossed its ally, ignored Badoglio’s reassurances and began increasing the German military presence in Italy.
    Allied forces commenced Operation Baytown on September 3 and started landing troops in Calabria, their first foothold on the European continent. That same day, while Badoglio’s representatives were signing an armistice agreement with General Eisenhower’s commanders in Sicily, Hitler’s envoy, Rudolf Rahn, was meeting with Badoglio in Rome, listening to the Italian leader’s words of assurance. The Allies embargoed news of the surrender for five days to coincide with Operation Avalanche—the landing of the main invasion force at Salerno.
    On September 8, Rahn, still in Rome, attended a brief late-morning audience with the king, who promised that Italy would “continue the struggle, to the end, at the side of Germany, with whom Italy is bound in life and death.” The pretense ended abruptly at 6:30 p.m. Mindful of the fifty-five thousand Allied troops just hours away from hitting the Salerno beaches, and still fuming over the message he had received from Badoglio earlier in the day attempting to renounce the surrender agreement, General Eisenhower made an announcement over Radio Algiers: “The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally.” Left with no alternative, Badoglio confirmed the news by making his own radio announcement shortly afterward. Many Italian soldiers “threw their weapons away,” one German officer wrote in his diary, “and showed their joy that the war was now