It is quite impossible to attach importance to material
possessions now. All that one still clings to is a few vital affections'
Iris Origo, October 1943.
Marchesa Iris Origo and her husband had been settled at their rural
estate of La Foce since 1924. When the Second World War broke out
Origo, an Englishwoman married to an Italian landowner, had divided
loyalties. But as the war dragged on and the hostilities escalated,
the small community of Val d'Orcia found themselves helping
evacuees, orphans, refugees, prisoners of war and soldiers from both
sides, concerned less with who was fighting whom than caring for
those who needed their aid.
Origo kept her diary throughout this time, when the risk of
betrayal was a fact of life and the penalty for helping the enemy
would result in death. Even with German troops occupying her manor
house, she wrote at night about her valiant attempts to shelter
refugees, burying her diary in the garden each morning.
The result is a book which has become a classic, an affirmation in
itself of courage and resistance, and an unsentimental, compelling
story of the trials and tragedies of wartime.
Iris Origo (née Cutting) was born in England in 1902 and brought
up in the United States, London, Kilkenny and Florence. She married
Antonio Origo in 1924 and the couple bought a large estate in the
heart of Tuscany, where her wartime diary and other books were
written. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and died
in 1988.
