Author(s): Robert M. Edsel

European

On the eve of the 1943 invasion of Italy, just weeks before Allied bombs nearly destroyed Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in Milan, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect mankind's greatest cultural treasures. In May 1944, two unlikely American heroes - an artist and a scholar - embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of stolen art, including works by Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio and Botticelli. As the Germans blew up the historic bridges of Florence and Allied air raids threatened Michelangelo's David, a heretofore-unknown SS general held the art hostage while negotiating a secret Nazi surrender with American spies. A gripping narrative that will appeal to fans of history, art, travel and adventure, Saving Italy takes us from the battlefields of Monte Cassino to the Vatican and behind closed doors with the great Allied and Axis leaders: Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Churchill; Hitler, Goring and Himmler.