At La Foce, the diarist and her husband hid escaped Allied prisoners, partisans, and twenty-three evacuee children in their farmhouse while German troops occupied the property and the front line moved through the valley. When shelling forced evacuation, the group walked for hours across open country to Montepulciano, the adults carrying the youngest children past dead bodies and under fire.
During occupation the sharpest hardship came not from any single army but from the breakdown of any reliable authority: Germans requisitioned livestock, Fascist conscripts and partisans both demanded loyalty, and bandits exploited the vacuum, so peasants faced competing predators none of whom could protect them.
Keeping a diary of harvests, births, meals, and weather alongside bombings registers how total war is experienced not as strategy but as interruption of ordinary life. Viewing the conflict through the farm calendar reveals that people continue planting and nursing children even as the front passes over them.
Individual Germans, Fascists, partisans, and Allied soldiers each showed both cruelty and unexpected kindness, so moral conduct tracked persons rather than uniforms. The diarist records a German officer protecting the children and a deserter stealing, concluding that behavior under war cannot be predicted from which side someone fights on.