Saving Italy. The Race To Rescue A Nation’s Treasures From The Nazis By Robert M. Edsel

"An astonishing account of a little-known American effort to save Italy's…art during World War II."―Tom Brokaw_x000D_

_x000D_

When Hitler’s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind’s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire._x000D_

_x000D_

On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes―artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt―embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli. With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the wa