The author an Anglo-American married to an Italian landowner in 1924 found herself raising a family during the civil war & foreign invasion in the remote Tuscan countryside. This diary records her concerns to keep her household & sixty orphans together & save a rural community from annihilation. It is a story of confusion & 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 & suffering of individual courage generosity & heroism.