The author, an Anglo-American married to an Italian landowner in 1924, found herself raising a family during the civil war and foreign invasion in the remote Tuscan countryside. This diary records her concerns to keep her household and sixty orphans together and save a rural community from annihilation. It is a story of confusion and bewilderment as a peasant society is confronted by disaster when, in the space of a few months, a whole way of life is changed completely beyond recognition. It is also a story of tragedy and suffering, of individual courage, generosity and heroism.