On a single day in July of 1943, more than 500 Allied planes bombed Rome, killing 1,500 people. The city got off lightly compared with Naples, which was attacked 200 times during the war and destroyed to the point that its citizens, in the words of one reporter, “camp[ed] out like Bedouins in deserts of brick.” Still, Italy suffered less than other parts of Europe: by war’s end, 50 percent of Warsaw’s citizens had been killed, many of the rest deported, and most of the city’s buildings damaged or destroyed. (The German Verbrennungs- und Vernichtungskommando — Burning and Destruction Detachment —…