sentences:  Innocenzi is shocked when his father introduces him to a fascist party leader who is recruiting men for the army of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, the fascist puppet state instituted by the Germans after the liberation of Benito Mussolini from his Gran Sasso exile.His father angrily responds to his objections, citing the misery he's living in and all the sacrifices he incurred to allow make him to study and become an army officer; a deep rift is created between father and son, and Innocenzi asks Ceccarelli to take him south to Naples as well, to which the engineer happily consents.However, Naples is in grimmer conditions than Rome, directly on the line of fire after the Allied landing at Salerno, barely kept under control by brutal German detachments who round up able-bodied men to send them to Germany as slave workers.