The Girl on the Via Flaminia

by Alfred Hayes

A dark love story set in wartime Rome from the author of In Love and Your Face for the World to See

Rome, 1944. Robert is a lonely American soldier looking for a girl. Lisa is cold and hungry, obliged to seek work at Mamma Pulcini's house on the Via Flaminia. Their lives come together in what should be a simple exchange, a temporary arrangement without love or complication. But in a city broken by war, its people defeated, nothing is simple. Based on Alfred Hayes'own experiences of wartime Italy, this spare, searing novel exposes the dark complexities of the relationship between men and women, victor and vanquished.

'Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences' Paul Bailey, Guardian

'Rings true as gold ... every single character in the book is sharp with the infallible stroke of art' Daily Mail

Genres: Fiction, Italy, Historical Fiction, American, Classics, Novels, Literature

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Alfred Hayes (18 April 1911 – 14 August 1985) was a British screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy and the United States. He is perhaps best known for his poem "Joe Hill" ("I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night…"), later set to music by Earl Robinson.
Born in London, Hayes graduated from New York's City College (now part of City University of New York), worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, and began writing fiction and poetry in the 1930s. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army Special Services (the "morale division"). Afterwards, he stayed in Rome and became a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films. As a co-writer on Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946), he was nominated for an Academy Award; he received another Academy Award nomination for Teresa (1951). He adapted his own novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia into a play; in 1953 it was adapted into a French-language film Un acte d'amour.
He was an uncredited co-writer of Vittorio De Sica's neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948) for which he also wrote the English language subtitles.
Among his U.S. filmwriting credits are The Lusty Men (1952, directed by Nicholas Ray) and the film adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars (1974). His credits as a television scriptwriter included scripts for American series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Nero Wolfe and Mannix.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

…they bomb each other, they destroy cities – but a girl in bed is a crime.

It’s no secret that women in wartime often resort to means outsides their usual moral code, and in this short novel set during the tail end of WW2 in Italy, the plight of women forced to make desperate choices mirrors the ambiguous nature of the Liberation of Rome, which to many Italian citizens was more of an Occupation than a Liberation.

Hayes places a British and an American soldier into the home of an Italian couple, Ugo and Adele, their adult son, Antonio, and Lisa, an ordinary Italian woman forced to sell her body to soldiers for food and shelter. This sets up a boiling pot situation. Antonio and Lisa are resentful of the Occupier’s sense of entitlement and superiority. Adele, like Lisa, has found an unlikely way to make a living by renting out her rooms to soldiers and girls, and Ugo wanders around mourning the loss of Europe.

I’m old, Ugo thought: and I’m tired. We were not made to be happy. Happiness is a condition we have permanently lost.

The city had no beauty now. The river had no history. When you stood on one of the bridges and looked at the city, you thought of home, and were depressed, and it seemed, because of the grayness over everything, that this war had been going on forever, and it would never end.

Robert, the American soldier, is trying to carve out a semblance of home by setting up a room with Lisa, urging her to unpack and relax. This forced domesticity is delicately written and filled with suspense and doom. Robert is arrogant, naïve, piggish, and we feel sorry for him, but not much; we mostly want to shake him because he’s the only one not seeing things for what they are. The room is choking with tension. He fumbles around not understanding the anger directed his way. Why does Lisa hate him when he’s American? How could she possibly? He’s the immature and misguided character put there to embody the Liberating/Occupying Allies. He’s demonized, but we see things though his eyes too. Nothing is simple and no one is right.

Meanwhile, down the hallway the British soldier stares into his wine glass in the dining room and dreams of home, lamenting that it’s been 5 years since he’s seen his wife.

Antonio broods in his room.

Everyone’s seeking a makeshift home in an unrecognizable world.

“Of course,” Adele Pulcini said, seeing how agitated he was, and knowing that soldiers could be ugly and dangerous when the things inside them began to hurt.

The death of innocence, the complexities of perspective, and the sacrifice of soldiers and ordinary people is deeply captured in this small book. Especially poignant is the vilification of Lisa and women like Lisa. Her papers are confiscated; her ID branded. Robert, confused again, wonders why their arrangement was such a problem because no one came after him.

If you’ve never read Alfred Hayes, if you’ve never experienced the pit-of-the-stomach sadness that his writing produces in me time after time, do yourself a favor and read The Girl on the Via Flaminia or In Love, or to a slightly lesser extent, My Face for the World to See. These three novels will wound you, but you’ll be grateful for them.

She thought: we do finally what we thought we were incapable of doing, and it is less that we thought the doing would be, and at the same time more. And nobody listens, nobody cares, one is alone. There are no drums, no overture, no curtain rising. The audience is cold, or asleep. And yet – could she have? Could she have gone on? No, it was impossible to have gone on. It was only possible if there was love. He was right in saying that would have made everything excusable. But there was no love. He did not want love. He wanted something else, something that had only the appearance of love, and it was better that it had ended, and tomorrow she would leave the house, and that would be the end of it.

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel about Italy near the end of WWII. An American soldier does not want to go to stand in line with a bunch of other GIs to enlist the services of a prostitute and so arranges to have an Italian young woman become his “wife” for an extended duration of time until the war ends and he can skedaddle back to the US. This novella is a stark portrayal of postwar Italy after the Germans left and the Allied Occupation arrived. Italy was growing war-weary. The Italian woman, Lisa, who shared a bed with the American solider, Robert, was not naïve, and there was often animosity between them. I am not sure I liked the American soldier and I am not sure I liked her. For that matter, I am not sure I liked anybody in the novel. Call me a curmudgeon. 🤨

These are comments on the back of the book (Europa Edition):
• It is a bigger story than it seems to be, for it has implications that spread throughout the city and the world. — The New York Times
• With its brilliant economy of detail, its dramatic rise and fall, and its wealth of interior suggestiveness, the story is close to the pattern of stage drama. — The Christian Science Monitor
• Alfred Hayes writes with grace and felicity. He is a master of contemporary fiction. — The New York Herald Tribune
• He makes every note ring clear and true. — The Saturday Review

Notes:
• The book was written in 1949. Alfred Hayes served with the U.S. Special Services in Europe during WWII and was stationed in Rome in 1943. He fell in love with the Italian language, which he soon learned to speak fluently. He contributed dialogue to De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1949), for which he was uncredited. (from Introduction by Paul Bailey)
• Also from Paul Bailey: Alfred Hayes had fallen out of fashion long before he died in 1985 at 74. Yet in the 1950s and 60s he was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists. His British admirers included such variously discerning authors and critics as Angus Wilson, Walter Allen, J Maclaren-Ross, Antonia White, Francis Wyndham and Elizabeth Bowen, who described his novella In Love as a "little masterpiece".
• The book sold for $2.50, hardcover, in 1949. 🙂

Reviews:
• This is from a blogsite of a Goodreads reviewer and is excellent: https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2018...
• http://www.mostlyfiction.com/world/ha...
• https://theopiatemagazine.com/2019/09...

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tough novel to evaluate aesthetically as it's about equally divided between its satisfying uses of the Hemingway/hard-boiled style and some pretty hackneyed and melodramatic passages as well. Historically, however, it's quite fascinating and teaches an important lesson: yet another reason to avoid war--as if death, destruction, and simply cost were not already sufficient deterrents.

The Girl on the Via Flaminia is a semi-panoramic snapshot of the U.S. occupation of Italy, Rome specifically, in the latter stages of WWII. The characters are believable and well chosen, even if they pretty clearly represent types: the young woman is poor, degraded Italy forced to sell itself like a streetwalker to the American soldier, who represents the semi-detached, lonely and tired conquerers, etc., etc. It's not so much heavy-handed as just obvious. It would have worked better, I think, in a film--where one hasn't the leisure of a reading to see how the machine is working, distracted as we are by the flickering images. (Noting that Hayes was, I guess at the same time that he wrote this, helping Roberto Rossellini to create the cinematic--and thematically similar--masterpiece Paisa'. Note: British born, but educated in the U.S.A., after the war Hayes retuned to the States and went Hollywood, but mostly worked in T.V., penning episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and, improbably, Mannix.)

One flaw of The Girl..., in my opinion, in terms of its aesthetics, is that the tale is rather unrelentingly grim. Although that's pretty clearly the point, and a real lesson after all of the American revisionist history that's hung over WWII ever since its end--a kind of residua, I suppose, of the propaganda fed the folks back home during the war. Here at least the shitty situation of a conquered nation internally divided even before the war between fascists and anti-fascists being sorted out by a former enemy turned liberator, who doesn't know which Italians it can trust and which it needs to fear--a situation that the looming cold war will only complicate more--literally starving to death while Yanks and Nazis fight to get to or defend Berlin can only be a picture of despair, desperation, and growing disillusionment. And it is. Still, even at terse 160 pp it's hard to read quickly as I just had to come up for air occasionally.

I think I'll write about this one for our local English-language Newspaper the Florence News comparing and contrasting it with Curzio Malaparte's similar yet far superior (in terms of style and reading pleasure) portrait of the U.S. occupation of Naples, La pelle. I'll post the article here once it's published.


Finally wrote that article. Here it is:



English writers in Post-War Rome and Cinecittà



A couple of years ago in these very pages I reviewed Jess Harper’s then new novel Beautiful Ruins and praised its delightful postmodern blending of American family histories, the artist’s calling, and Italy’s dolce vita period, replete with American film stars making swords and sandals epics at Cinecittà by day while hobnobbing with the jet set on the Via Veneto by night. Well, it turns out that there were some American and British writers in Rome during that fabled post-war period whose works also bear reading today. Let me put a pair of these novels on you radar should that time and place pique your interest, namely Alfred Hayes’s The Girl on the Via Flaminia and Muriel Spark’s The Public Image.

Alfred Hayes was born in the Whitechapel neighborhood of London, in 1911. At the age of three, however, his family relocated to New York where he grew up and went to university. Twelve years too young to be an ambulance driver in WWI like Hemingway, and really a bit too old to be a soldier come WWII, Hayes was drafted anyway and landed in Rome in the morale division of the US Army Special Services. I would not say, however that moral was Hayes’s strong point since his writing is primarily empathetic and consequently tragic in tone. However, what might not have been so good for his army stint was certainly good for what followed for he left us three books of poetry, seven novels, and a bevy of film and TV scripts that while they never catapulted him to fame, bear up pretty well today.

Two of Hayes’s novels, All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1947) take place in recently liberated Rome, where Hayes remained after the war, contributing his literary talents to the explosion of neo-realistic films that sprouted from the rubble of that city and took the cinematic world by storm, notably Rosselini’s Paisà and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Of the two novels, The Girl on the Via Flaminia remains in print (Penguin Classics, 2018) and is well worth a read. This novel takes its place alongside Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte’s excellent semi-fictional The Skin as an evocation of the uneasy alliance between liberator and liberated in post-war Italy. Like all of Hayes’s novels the accent is on solitude and loneliness, and the tension of the plot revolves around a lonely American soldier looking for love and a humiliated Roman woman who seems to have no other choice for survival but to sell herself to the highest bidder. Yes, the novel is bleak, yet also beautifully written in Hayes’s post-Hemingway hardboiled prose, and every page rings with the truth of the tragedy of the situation.

After his Roman experiences, Hayes found himself back in New York initially, and then in Hollywood where he continued to write for film and, finally television, and where he died in 1985. He shared an office with Mel Brooks at Columbia in the ‘50s and finished his screenwriting career by writing for TV. Two of his shorter novels of the Hollywood period, In Love (1953) and My Face for the World to See (1958) have been reissued by NYRB Classics and are still getting rave reviews to this day.

Muriel Spark, the Scottish-born quintessential female British novelist of the twentieth Century, also flirted with Rome—she moved there in the late ‘60s after some years in New York and before settling definitively in Oliveto here in Tuscany in the early ‘70s. The Public Image (1968) remains Spark’s Roman period legacy, a novel that charts the trials and tribulations of a British actress, Annabel, attempting to construct and maintain a number of selves: her real life as a wife and mother, her public image, and the tiger-lady that she portrays in films. Spark’s wicked wit really shines here, as in all of her novels, and The Public Image is a fun, short read from the much more decadent, latter end of Cinecittà’s heyday. Reading it I couldn’t help but wonder if the model for Annabel wasn’t scream queen Barbara Steele, the British actress who failed rather spectacularly in Hollywood only to carve out a career in quirky and kitschy Italian horror films beginning with Mario Bava’s stunning Mask of Satan (Black Sunday in the U.S.) in 1960.

And, yes, the novel apparently inspired the name of John Lydon’s post Sex Pistols group Public Image Ltd. and the lyrics to the song of the same name.

[Helen (Helena/Nell) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this modest novel. It starts in a quiet way: "The wind blew through Europe. It was a cold wind, and there were no lights in the city."

The cold wind blows through the rest of the narrative.

It's set in Italy just before the end of the second World War, but "nobody knew at this time that the war would end in a few months". The war has been going on for more than five years. "Sometimes men would escape from the prison camps near the Austrian border. They would come home to their wives so terribly changed the women would shriek."

It is not a psychological novel. There is no deep analysis of what goes on in people's heads. In fact, most of what goes on inside the head is terribly private, and the awful pathos of what is not shared intensifies as the novel goes on. Lonely people at an awful time, and all of it simply and beautifully written.

I didn't know I was becoming so involved with the central characters (the American officer Robert, and the desperate but sadly dignified Italian young woman, Lisa) but it grew on me gradually through the plain direct writing, the clarity of the experience.

Robert wants a girl, not just a one-off prostitute. He wants a regular clean girl: a simple exchange -- sex with a decent, nice young woman for a bit of cash, which will buy her coffee and food and all the things her country is starved of.

But she is a decent young woman and the transaction turns out not to be simple. And although they are not in love, they are not just in sex either. She is articulate and rebellious. She is also completely trapped. You see all of it from both points of view, hers and his. You feel for them both.

This is such good writing:

"He bent down and kissed the visible corner of her mouth. Her face was very cold. He looked at her for a moment and then went out of the room."

I was stunned by the ending. It will haunt me for a long, long time.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not your typical World War 2 novel. A short, well-written, pleasant balance between prose and dialogue. I would describe this as a very "intimate" novel. Most of the story, with the exception of a couple of scenes, takes place in two rooms of an Italian home on -- you guessed it! -- the Via Flaminia in Rome. As a reader, I became very much "at home" in this environment and with the half-dozen main characters. The author skilfully uses memories and flashbacks to fill in background impressions relevant to the plot in a way which both satisfies the curiosity and piques the interest of the reader while maintaining the sense of mystery to the last word.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's set in Rome, Italy during World War II. Robert is an American stationed in Rome during the period following the liberation of Italy from the Germans. Italy was very grateful to the Allies...at first...but now they just want them gone. They want their country back.

Robert has made a deal with a local Italian girl, Lisa. She rents a room in a house, they pretend they are married. She gets some food, gifts, etc....he gets company at night. But in war, nothing is that simple.

This was a fairly short novel but very powerful. The book jacket sort of gave me the impression that this was a love story. But I wouldn't call it that. It really portrayed a segment of society that may get overlooked in other war stories. What happens to people when their country is occupied whether it be by friends or foe? What happens to the women? How do they survive?

I found it fascinating that Robert is an American while Alfred Hayes was a British writer. It really didn't portray Americans in a positive light...not negatively but definitely not positive either. Maybe spoiled and naive. And the title of the book, I think, references the type of girls who walk the streets who get picked up for money. And of course the ending was perfect for this type of novel. It really leaves you hanging...which is the point.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A concisely written, interesting short novel with crisp dialogue. An American officer in Rome at the later stages of World War II wants to have sex with a young Italian woman, without going to a brothel. Instead he pays to have a room in a large flat where he expects the girl to stay. Middle aged Adele Pulcini runs the establishment, cooking for the soldiers. Through Adele it is arranged for Lisa to stay in the flat with Robert, the American officer. They pose as a married couple. Whilst Robert has no scruples about the arrangement and makes it clear that he isn’t in love, Lisa is not happy with the arrangement even though she is unemployed, poor and hungry. To add to the drama is Adele’s son Antonio who comments disparagingly to Lisa.

This is a very well written story where each sentence adds to the overall drama that unfolds. Highly recommended.

This book was first published in 1949.

[Demetrios Dolios · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a fun little break. Hayes sadly forgotten, captures greatly moments of not so fictional characters in their whirlwind of life influenced by global moments. The great unknown characters, the "nobodies" and in a small digestible novel in a beautiful stream of consciousness their emotional interplays. In particular with "Via.." Hayes expertly, dare say gives us an antiwar novel with WW2 as a silent character focusing on the "normal people" (working class?). Overall emotional vibe almost like a Gracq without the dreamy, ethereal part but an emotional (neo)realist manner and same introspection.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'Do you know, signora, when I left in my transport from Augusta to sail from Africa there was a time I thought I would enjoy the war? I thought it would force me into a heroism, and to be a hero, even a reluctant one, is an attractive idea. I thought war was something like firefighting: a great blaze, and then men, all together, working to put it out.' He grinned, savagely, and she realized that the mockery was not directed at her, but at himself, at that poor illusioned Antonio who had gone into the transport at Augusta. 'But how wrong I was; war is the opposite of men working together. It is more than ever only men trying to save themselves separately."" (49)

Having read and loved In Love and appreciated My Face for the World to See, I decided to complete my collection of books by Alfred Hayes with The Girl on the Via Flaminia. It's definitely not his best-written work, but the story is powerful; he captures a rare glimpse of life in Italy after the country has been 'liberated' by Americans but the war has not yet ended. That is, a period when the liberators come to feel like the oppressors, and there seems to be no way out.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

First time reading Hayes although I've known about him for some time now. A quick, short novel that brings sadness to your heart and the truth to your eyes.

Times during WW2 not only made it difficult for the men but also the women. Hayes, in a short time, manages to capture our main characters beautifully. Do yourself a favor and read it.

[Amy Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty much perfect short story. Hayes creates so much with seeming effortlessness in so few pages. A 150 page masterpiece of a novel.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers he worked with in Italy, Alfred Hayes focusses his social drama against the larger backdrop of a world at war.

The Europa Edition has taken a novella sized story and printed it large and long, as it it were a novel; this is unfortunate, because it really could never be, and good as it is, it shrinks into the presentation. (And the opposite is probably true-- if it had been presented as a short story, this work would seem much more distinguished than here, fluffed out to twice its real size.)

Hayes has a very impressive résumé-- as a screenwriter, he worked with the leading lights of the postwar Italian new wave : Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini; later with Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood. Most writers would give anything to have even one of those names on their list of credits.

Maybe knowing that is what keeps the reader feeling that this is something of a 'treatment', a summarization of what will be a dramatic rendition on the screen. Because it seems that way, as if the notes for a set of workshop classes in drama, scenarios to be built upon rather than a set novella form.

Regardless, Hayes is clearly writing from life here, and it's an unusual perspective, the view of the reluctant conqueror in a fallen city. As you read, you can see the film, and it is a compelling story.

[JacquiWine · Rating 5 out of 5]

After serving in the US army in the Second World War, the British-born writer Alfred Hayes stayed on in Rome at the end of the conflict where he worked with some of the leading lights in the Italian neo-realist film movement, Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. This talent for scriptwriting shows in Hayes’ 1949 novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia, a slim work which zooms in on a microcosm of a society irreparably damaged by the ravages of war. It’s a brilliant, bleak yet beautifully written book, shot through with an aching sense of pain and sadness. Here’s how it opens:

The wind blew through Europe. It was a cold wind, and there were no lights in the city. (p.3)

To read the rest of my review, please click here:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2018...

[Larry Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Girl on the Via Flaminia, written by Alfred Hayes in 1949. A scorching melodrama, it would have made a great play on the stage… but far ahead of its time in the views portrayed. The young Italian adults (Lisa, Antonio & Nina) with their underlying rage at their being captive first to Germany, then to their “liberators” the Allies, as well as their own institutional injustices (the Carabinieri and the Magistrate) present a different aspect to the undersides of war. A rather stunning novel, by an American who served in Italy in 1943 as one of the occupiers…

The Set. “In one of the apartment houses in that section of the city where the Via Flaminia crossed the Milvio bridge there was a flat in which a family known as the Pulcinis lived. It was a flat of six rooms, and the dining room which was large had been converted by the Signora Adele Pulcini into a place where the soldiers came at night for wine and eggs. — The soldiers called the Signora Adele Pulcini “Mamma.” And one night, toward the end of December, as the war unknowingly was coming to its hoped-for end, two soldiers were sitting at the big mahogany table in the Pulcini’s apartment, drinking wine. One of the soldiers was a short, wiry, middle-aged aged English sergeant, and the other was an American, a young American… “How did I wind up in Italy?” he said to the English sergeant. “I wanted to go to France. My old man was in France in the last one. You ever go with a French broad, sarge?” —“Listen, sarge,” the American said. “Know what they can do with Europe? All of it? Fold it three ways and ram it.”

Robert —Lisa. “Perhaps he should have boasted he was. The boys always said they were. The idea was to make them think you were even if you weren’t. That made it easier, too, when they thought you were rich. And, of course, the point was to make it as easy as possible, and not to waste too much time talking. Just talk to them enough to make it easy.” — “There’s a big villa at Anzio,” he said. “In the pine wood. Do you know it? I guess it belongs to some duke. The duke has quite a library. Or he had. He probably doesn’t have it any more.” —“The lieutenant was cold. He was feeding the duke’s nice Latin manuscripts into a cozy fire.” “It must be wonderful,” she said, standing there. “What?” “To be an American,” she said, “and to be the conqueror of Europe.”

Antonio. —“thought I would enjoy the war? I thought it would force me into a heroism, and to be a hero, even a reluctant one, is an attractive idea. But how wrong I was; war is the opposite of men working together. It is more than ever only men trying to save themselves separately.”

Lisa —Robert. “Cute,” the girl said, pronouncing it. “What words they use for endearments. Babbee, darling, cute. What a language for love. Everything is said with the teeth. The, the—“ she said, showing him how the tongue had to click against her teeth in order to say it. — “Italian is soft,” she said, “and musical. And the language says exactly what it means. The,” she said again, contemptuously. “What is it? Masculine? Feminine?” “It’s neuter,” Robert said. “The,” she said. “In Italian nothing is neuter. The article agrees with the noun. Masculine or feminine.” “I don’t think things should be neuter either.” “I mean the language,” she said. “I don’t,” he said. “I mean everything.” — “I have nothing to go to church for.” “Well, people go to pray.” “I’m in anger with God.” — “You don’t trust anybody, do you?” Robert said. “You don’t think anybody keeps a promise.” “Words don’t make flour,” she said. “What’s that? A proverb?” “Do you have a proverb about happiness?” “Only that God sends flies to the starved horse.” —“What are you thinking about?” “Niente.” “You’re so quiet you must be thinking about something.” “About God,” she said. “God?” “Yes,” she said, in the darkness. “That He has a lot to forgive me, and I have as much to forgive Him.”

Ugo (Antonio’s father. “ sometimes I think that whatever happens to us after the war, whatever happens to Italy, what we become, will all be because of the things that are happening to our young now...and they are not good things, Roberto: they are very bad. To have no work, to have no faith, to have nothing they can take pride in, to have nothing they really love.... — “What are you, Ugo?” “A kind of socialist who is more of an old man than he is a socialist. You see, in Italy, we’re always a kind of something. Not the exact thing, like the Germans or the English. But only a kind of, with many shades.” — “There was once a woman who had three children. They were named Benito, Victor Emmanuel and Italia. When she was asked why she had named them so, the woman answered: Because Benito eats all the time, Victor Emmanuel sleeps all the time...and Italia...” “Italia,” he said, “weeps all the time.”

Robert. “things were complex. The being lost, the nights in a long room where somebody shouted in his sleep, or somebody cried, or somebody coughed, that was complex. Thinking was complex. Thinking what a gun was doing in your hand. Why you went on and on when there was no apparent and true reason why you should go on and on. Why at no point you resisted. — I wanted to have a house I could come to, and a girl there, mine. I wanted it as simple as that, as simple as it could possibly be. And I thought I would just be exchanging something somebody needed for something I needed. Something somebody wanted for something I wanted.”

Ugo. “What a hard people you are,” the old man said. “What a sentimental people you are,” Robert said. “In Italy,” the old man said, “we say: when the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.”

Robert becomes the unknowing husband, caught in the melodrama— not innocent. A good short read. Rather extraordinary for 1949… I think.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short book…a book about a man and a woman brought together in Rome after the war. The liberation of Rome was not a joyful time for many Italians. Young women doing what they had to, to feed themselves and their families. This book is very subtly written. It teases the edges of providing sex for something in return besides love...without ever becoming vulgar or imperceptive.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the style of his neorealist movie scripts

[Liina · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the backdrop of Europe in the turmoil of WWII just about to end, two lost souls seek intimacy and security in this slim novel by Alfred Hayes.

Robert is an American soldier and Lisa is an Italian woman who is forced to sell her company for food and shelter. Almost all of the novel takes place in the house of Adele - an elderly woman who rents out the rooms for soldiers and girls for the long term. A weird fake sort of marriage unit as they are, Lisa and Robert each have their bruises from the war and it isn't made any easier but the fact that Robert, as an American is seen as the occupier.

Hayes was a screenwriter and this novel is one of those books that you can immediately imagine working very on the big screen or even in the theatre. The setting is pretty contained to a few places yet the novel touches themes that have great scope - the war, the vulnerability of women during the war, love under impossible circumstances. It is quite melodramatic but bleak at the same time. The mood reminded me of Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a fur Coat but also Erich Maria Remarque novels. Where Hayes stands out though is his economic way of conveying the emotional depth of the characters.

Robert's and Lisa's careful treading in the territory of domesticity in their limited circumstances was truly heartbreaking. This combined with the brilliantly written atmosphere of Italy in WWII made it an excellent and quite unforgettable little novel. To be enjoyed on a rainy autumn night with some good cognac and a reminiscence about things past.

[Agnieszka Hofmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Króciutka i prosta historia o niesamowitym ładunku emocji, stawiająca kilka ważnych pytań o cenę godności i o to, czy możliwa jest miłość w czasach, gdy wszystko jest na sprzedaż. Rzecz dzieje się w Rzymie, w grudniu 44 roku, już po wyzwoleniu południowej części Włoch, ale jeszcze przed zakończeniem wojny. Jest bieda. Każdy próbuje jakoś przeżyć. W tym, a może głównie - kobiety. Hayes rysuje tu prostą konstelację, która rodzi konsekwencje, przed którymi nie sposób uciec. To zaledwie kilka dni z życia garstki osób w tym wojennym Rzymie, a tyle ważnych kwestii! Przegranymi, jak to zazwyczaj się dzieje, są kobiety.
Mało się o tym mówi, ale warto zwrócić uwagę na wyjątkowość tego wydania. Wielka wdzięczność dla wydawnictwa Próby za odkrycie i przypomnienie tej perełki w pięknej edytorskiej formie, jakże różnej od śmieciowej estetyki licznych współczesnych książek.

[Liz Mayhew · Rating 5 out of 5]

“…whatever happens to us after the war, whatever happens to Italy, what we become, will all be because of the things that are happening to our young now… and they are not good things, Roberto: they are very bad. To have no work, to have no faith, to have nothing they can take pride in, to have nothing they really love… If the seedling is twisted, the whole tree grows crooked. (…) Our own lives are small, and perhaps not too important.”

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s funny because this book was not at all what I expected. In the same way Stefan Zweig manages to subtlety describe a person’s emotional arc, Hayes seems to do the same with relationships between people and how a real connection can make things more complicated. Robert and Lisa perfectly navigate the difficulties we can all face when you’re attracted to someone but you don’t know how to communicate it. Beautifully devastating, giving us hope for a real connection

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a depressing view of post World War II in Italy. Italy lost, and some of the people in the book, Antonio and Lisa, hated Americans for winning. In a live story that never starts, the American soldier is rebuffed at every turn by Lisa. Just as it looks like Lisa is relenting, she runs away. Ugh.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The recent rediscovery of screenwriter Alfred Hayes' work as a novelist provides a welcome trove of short, flab-free novels which cover a lot of emotional and psychological ground. This novella is set in post-WW2 Rome and covers the complicated relationship between an American GI who "just wants a girl" in a private place instead of the street, and an Italian provincial girl who pretends to be his wife for the sake of the transaction, but has a terrible time accepting the psychological implications of what she is doing and ends up falling into a deep self-loathing. Her friend finds it easy, she does not. Meanwhile, Italy, a proud nation vanquished in ignominious circumstances has to come to terms with the Americans having so much while they have so little to eat. This is a ripe moment to use as the setting for such a novel and indeed the whole scenario resonates even when it is not crackling with uncertain energy.

For mine, I would have liked to see Hayes be more rigorous with the linguistic element: there are conversations here that are in Italian between Italians but rendered in English with the odd signpost word and others that are between English speakers and Italians. Even allowing for the former having spent some time here now, they would still not be conversing as linguistic equals and this, to my mind, breaks the sense of verisimilitude that I think is necessary in what is essentially a piece of neo-realism. Whether our American is scraping through in Italian or his "wife" is dusting off some English, there is a problem in that the intersection would not give us the opportunity for loaded or hidden meanings. It would all be more superficial with a narrator filling in any shortfalls. Instead they speak on their even terms and this has the unfortunate side effect of making both main characters rather shallow in some scenes that are ostensibly playing for depth.

That said, it is really worth reading Hayes and this novel. There are some brilliant descriptions of the time and some wonderful near-silent scenes, where the action, despite being simple and universal, is able to be as deep as he intends the conversations to be.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Girl On The Via Flaminia" is the third short novel by Alfred Hayes that has been republished in recent years. Like "In Love" and "My face For The World To See", it absolutely deserves to be rediscovered by a whole new generation of readers, and Hayes himself deserves to be at last considered for what he is: one of the major American writers of the last century. In "The Girl On The Via Flaminia", a lonely, traumatized American soldier in Rome, at the end of WWII, makes an arrangement with an Italian girl who has also been traumatized by the ravages of the conflict in her homeland. But nothing goes has planned. War is ugly, its consequences horrific, the occupation of a country creates damages beyond imagination, peace is not what it is supposed to be. With Hayes, all the clichés about the supposedly “good” war are torn to pieces, and with a raw, aching humanity, he shows us – through a beautifully intimate chamber piece, deliberately avoiding all things epic - the reality of a ravaged Italy and of its distraught people. Women, especially, are at the heart of this story, women who are used by foreign soldiers, by their own countrymen, and by a society that treat them shamefully. "The Girl On The Via Flaminia" is a sad, heartbreaking novel that rings eerily (and depressingly) modern and contemporary, even if some references are definitely of their time. Hayes is a master at dissecting complex, human emotions in a subtle, non-sentimental way, and his prose is exquisite and often poetic without ever being precious. There are pages in this book about the traumas of war that are extraordinarily powerful. With Hayes, the drab reality that his characters are fighting with destroys, most of the time, the few glimmer of hopes. In that sense, the ambiguous, uncertain ending, is devastating.

[Pratheesh Parameswaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Roberto ' , Ugo said .

' yes ? '

' Do you love Lisa ?'

' it's not a question of love' ,he said .

' what is it a question of then ? '

'she was hungry ,I was lonely, that's the story' ,Robert said .

1944 കാലഘട്ടത്തിൽ അമേരിക്കൻ പട്ടാളക്കാരനായി ഇറ്റലിയിൽ എത്തിചേർന്ന Alfred Hayes തൻ്റെ സ്വന്തം അനുഭവങ്ങളെ അധികരിച്ചെഴുതിയ നോവലാണ് " The Girl On the Via flaminia " തൻ്റെ വിരസമായ മിലിട്ടറി ബാരക്കിലെ ജീവിതത്തിൽ നിന്നും മാറി ഒരു സ്ത്രീയോടൊപ്പം കഴിയാനുള്ള ആഗ്രഹത്താൽ 'Robert ' എന്ന പട്ടാളക്കാരൻ 'Lisa'എന്ന ചെറുപ്പക്കാരിയോടൊപ്പം Mamma Pulcini എന്നു വിളിക്കുന്ന സ്ത്രീയുടെ വീട്ടിൽ താല്ക്കാലിക��ായൊരു താവളം സംഘടിപ്പിക്കുകയും ഇരുവരും ഒരുമിച്ചൊരു റൂമിൽ താമസമാരംഭിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നതിനിടയിൽ ഇരുവർക്കുമിടയിൽ നടക്കുന്ന സംഘർഷങ്ങളും -
യുദ്ധത്തിന്റെ ഭയാനകമായ പ്രത്യാഘാതങ്ങൾ, സൈനികർക്കും സേനകൾക്കും മാത്രമല്ല, അവശേഷിക്കുന്ന സാധാരണക്കാർക്കും വരുത്തിയ നാശനഷ്ടങ്ങളും ആഘാതങ്ങളും ,അതിജീവിക്കാൻ സ്വന്തം അന്തസും അഭിമാനവും വിട്ടുവീഴ്ച ചെയ്യുകയല്ലാതെ മറ്റു സാധ്യതകളില്ലാത്ത ലിസയെപ്പോലുള്ള സാധാരണ വ്യക്തികളെ കേന്ദ്രീകരിച്ച്, യുദ്ധത്താൽ തകർന്ന ഒരു രാജ്യത്തിന്റെ ഛായാചിത്രം Hayes ഈ നോവലിൽ വരച്ചുകാട്ടുന്നു.

[Mk100 · Rating 3 out of 5]

My father told me that when this novel came out after the War it was considered exceptional and representative of a new style by his journalism professor. My father spent 50 years trying to find a copy and finally did. I enjoyed the novel a lot, but it hasn't had the same impact on me as it did my father's professor. Perhaps that's because what was new and exciting then is now routine or even passe. But the story itself is a good one, and one can see what the writer is trying to that must have been different. Worth a read.

[Keri · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting to see the changes that war makes on a country and a people. I it is also interesting to see how those who help end the war are preceived by those they think they are freeing from the war. I did not like the ending... as a romantic of course I choose to beleive her finds her, she is fine and they live happily ever after; I don't beleive that is what Hayes is going for here.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a bit anachronistic regarding attitudes toward sex without the flimsy protection of marriage, so I had to constantly remind myself that this took place in the last days of WWII in Rome.

What I particularly appreciated was the author's way in which he gave life to the mental anguish of a war-fatigued nation (actually all of Europe). Totally worth a read.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become interested in the psychological as well as actual events of war. In this novel, the relationship of the occupier and the occupied is explored in a different way than that developed by John Steinbeck in The Moon is Down.

[Trina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short novel is set in Rome at the end of World War 2. It is one of Hayes's "doomed love affair" novels, apparently. It's winter, the war is still going on but Rome has been "liberated" by the Allies, and an American soldier links up with a young Italian woman. It's all grim.

[César OG · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick, brutal, raw story. An easy beginning, an engaging development, and a heartless ending. This depiction of Italy in the last stretch of World War 2 shows us in a desperate, angry way what humans are capable of doing to survive, and how far we will go to preserve that humanity.