A story of courage, sacrifice, and individual heroism—a noble episode in the history of a great people. The story of the underground battle of the Italians against the Nazis and Fascisti, largely unknown outside Italy, was, unlike the French Resistance, a spontaneous, city-by-city, region-by-region uprising. This book traces the the growth of the wartime Resistance from its birth in 1943, against overwhelming odds, to its dramatic triumph two years later. Here are Neapolitan youngsters fighting German tanks; patriots operating an underground radio station inside Nazi-occupied Florence; Romans ambushing a Nazi patrol; mountain fighters blasting enemy convoys; peasants who hid partisans and Allied escapees; and priests and nuns who outfoxed Nazi and Fascist patrols. It was a moving episode, a lesson for all of us who live so easily in the kind of society dreamed of by the partisans.