The Arpino Assignment

by Geoffrey Trease

First published 1988

Amazon

3.1(19)

A dangerous assignment carries young agents through Italy during the Allied campaign. Local resistance, military intelligence and the changing front make every route and contact uncertain.

The novel introduces the fragmented conditions of wartime Italy, where occupation, civil conflict and liberation overlapped. Trease gives attention to civilians and partisans whose choices could not be reduced to the movement of armies on a map.

Italy’s fractured wartime geography makes intelligence especially difficult. German occupation, Allied advances, partisan groups and local political rivalries can all change the meaning of a contact from one valley to the next. The young agents must therefore judge civilians as individuals rather than treating the population as a single resistance movement, while the front continues to move around them.