I’d like to take a moment to give a shout-out to researcher Janet Kinrade Dethick for her excellent autobiography, An Insatiable Curiosity: A Personal Journey through Wartime Italy, which was published last December.

Janet’s foray into researching and writing about WWII in Italy began over a quarter century ago.

She was managing holiday properties in Umbria when she had what she calls a “chance encounter” in 1999 with octogenarian Jack Doyle, who had been an Australian pilot during WWII. Jack wanted to rent a villa near Lake Trasimeno, where he had been on special assignment in 1944 when he was injured by a bomb blast. 

“My encounter with Jack Doyle changed my life,” Janet explains, “as listening to his experiences led me to investigate what happened during World War Two in the area around Lake Trasimeno.”

Her first book, The Trasimene Line, June–July 1944, was published in 2002. The insatiable curiosity rooted in her meeting with Jack has led Janet to delve ever more deeply into researching and writing about Italy during WWII. Most of her research concerns POW camps in Italy, escaped prisoners of war on the run following camp breakouts, and the Italians who protected the escapees. She has also written about the Italian resistance, isolated wartime events, and war crimes committed during WWII.

A current list of books by Janet on goodreads.com numbers an impressive 22 distinct titles. That’s nearly a title a year during the course of her research career.

Additionally, Janet’s own website has a list of her eight websites dedicated to prisoners of war, war cemeteries, and POW camps. She has also authored several websites on WWII written in Italian, and she has a YouTube presence.

Regarding An Insatiable Curiosity, Janet says, “These investigations have taken me on journeys from Piedmont to Puglia, and from Liguria and Lombardy to Lazio, Tuscany, Le Marche and Abruzzo, visiting existing camps and the sites of former camps, and meeting people who are trying to conserve what remains of a painful period of Italian history.

“I have been threatened with court action; I have been considered a ‘non qualified’ person; I have de-bunked one or two myths.

“The time has come for me to record my experiences for posterity, hence this book.”

To which I’d add, “Bravo.”

An Insatiable Curiosity can be ordered on Amazon in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere around the globe.