Maria Levi did not carry a rifle. She carried pasta. After an Allied prisoner of war escaped from an Italian camp in September 1943, Levi waded barefoot across a river with a pot balanced on her head to feed him. It sounds like a fable until you remember what it really was: supply and sustainment, delivered by a civilian, in occupied territory, to a man the Germans would happily shoot. She was one of the thousands of Italian women who did their part to win World War II.
Italy’s armistice on Sept. 8, 1943, didn’t end the war on the peninsula. It rearranged it. Germany moved in, propped up fascist forces, and turned much of Italy into a battlefield that ran through rail lines, city blocks, farm roads, and kitchens. In that environment, the Allies were helped “most effectively” by resistance networks behind German lines, and women were the grease in those gears: the people who could move, connect, hide, and warn when a uniform would draw a bullet.
