27 April 1938 – Michael MacWhite arrives in Rome as Irish Minister to the Quirinale.
23 July 1938 – Running street fights between Italian navy cadets and Irish anti-Fascists around O’Connell St., Dublin.
21 November 1938 – Vincenzo Berardis arrives in Dublin as Italian Minister to the Irish Free State.
March 1939 – Eamon de Valera, in Rome for coronation of Pope Pius XII, visits several Irish religious communities and gives talk on Vatican Radio’s first St. Patrick’s Day broadcast to Ireland.
3 September 1939 – France and Great Britain declare war on Germany. Italy declares its ‘non-belligerence’. Irish Augustinians in Alban Hills outside Rome listen to Radio Eireann broadcast of all-Ireland hurling final.
January 1940 – Former Irish minister to Germany Charles Bewley travels from Berlin to Rome as correspondent for a Nazi-sponsored press agency.
15 May 1940 – Arrest of Irish seaman Arthur Sawyers in Genoa.
End-May 1940 – Irish minister to the Holy See William Macaulay leaves Rome for the US.
End May-early June 1940 – Two meetings of heads of Irish religious communities and Irish diplomatic representatives to discuss arrangements should Italy enter the war.
10 June 1940 – Italy declares war on France and Great Britain.
5 July 1940 – Arrest in Palermo and internment of Evelyn Devine.
October 1940 – Stanislaus Joyce dismissed from his post at the university of Trieste and banished to Florence (December).
23 December 1940 – Vatican Radio broadcasts Christmas messages from some of the 480 Irish citizens in Italy.
8 January 1941 – Rabidly anti-British interview by high-ranking Irish prelate (allegedly rector of the Irish College Denis McDaid) appears in ‘Il Giornale d’Italia’.
Spring 1941 – Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty appointed by Vatican to visit prisoner-of-war camps in Italy.
7 May 1941 – Irish Department of External Affairs warns Berardis to tone down propaganda emanating from Italian Legation in Dublin.
22 June 1941 – Darina Laracy expelled to Switzerland after a year working for English-language news agencies in Rome.
21 July 1941 – Fr. Thomas O’Shaughessy leaves Rome to become chaplain to Irish prisoners of war in Friesack, Germany. Returns to Rome in December.
October 1941 – Thomas Kiernan arrives in Rome as Irish Minister to the Holy See along with his wife, the singer Delia Murphy, and their four children.
19 June 1942 – Darina Laracy briefly detained by Swiss police for activities on behalf of Italian anti-fascist movements.
August 1942 – Arthur Sawyers released from internment camp near Parma, repatriated to Ireland.
November 1942 – Local fire brigade requisitions Villa Irlanda, Irish College’s summer retreat. Villa subsequently put to use as a hospital, first by the Italian navy, then by German forces.
December 1942 – Charles Bewley travels from Italy to Berlin along with Donal Hales (the Genoa-based former ‘consular and diplomatic agent of the Irish Republic’) to meet German intelligence officers.
8 July 1943 – Allied invasion of Sicily
19 July 1943 – San Lorenzo district of Rome bombed by Americans. This, the heaviest air raid of the war on the Italian capital, elicits strong negative reaction from Irish bishops.
25 July 1943 – Benito Mussolini falls from power. Elation in the streets of Rome.
7 August 1943 – Rosminian priest Joseph Hunt arrested and imprisoned in Aosta. Released the following month.
11 August 1943 – Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing arrives back in Rome from Dublin. Fearful of arrest, he seeks refuge at the Irish Legation to the Holy See.
8 September 1943 – Italian capitulation officially announced.
9 September 1943 – Allied forces land in Salerno, south of Naples.
9-10 September 1943 – Germans conquer Rome, overcoming sporadic Italian resistance.
12 September 1943 – Vincenzo Berardis declares loyalty to King Vittorio Emanuele III, resulting in split in Italian community in Ireland.
Mid-September 1943 – Irish Legation in Rome begins issue of protective notices to premises owned or run by Irish citizens.
30 September 1943 – First meeting of ‘Council of Three’, including Huge O’Flaherty, to organise help for on-the-run Allied prisoners of war.
October 1943 – Charles Bewley leaves Rome for Merano, a spa town in northern Italy under German administration.
Early October 1943 – Fernando Soleti, head of the carabinieri paramilitary force, seeks refuge among the Irish Dominicans at San Clemente in Rome.
16 October 1943 – Nazi round-up of Jews in Roman ghetto. Jews and other people on the run seek asylum in Irish establishments.
Mid-October 1943 – Dubliner Denis Johnston, correspondent for the BBC, disembarks in Brindisi.
28 October 1943 – Meeting of Italian Fascists in an ice-cream parlour in Dublin called “to discuss recent developments” leads to establishment of support committee for Mussolini’s new puppet regime in northern Italy.
November 1943 – Hugh O’Flaherty escapes arrest by the SS at the palace of prince Doria Pamphili.
22 January 1944 – Allied landings at Anzio and Nettuno, south of Rome.
27 January 1944 – Two pigs slaughtered by student priests at the Irish College confiscated by the authorities.
3 February 1944 – Irish Augustinian priest Ambrose Roche detained for distributing cigarettes to American POWs. Released after intervention by German and Irish diplomats.
18 February 1944 – Interrogation of leading Dublin Fascists succeeds in curtailing their activities.
17 March 1944 – In his St. Patrick’s Day message, Eamon De Valera calls for belligerents to spare the Eternal City from destruction.
23 March 1944 – Ambush in Via Rasella in Rome kills 33 German SS policemen.
24 March 1944 – In reprisal, the Germans execute 335 Italians in the Adreatine caves outside Rome.
3 June 1944 – German deserter unsuccessfully seeks refuge at St. Patrick’s Church in Rome, administered by the Irish Augustinians.
4 June 1944 – Denis Johnston runs into German stragglers on the outskirts of Rome. First American units penetrate the city in the evening.
5 June 1944 – Liberation of Rome proclaimed. Hugh O’Flaherty meets US general Mark Clark.
7 June 1944 – Irish College rector Denis McDaid driven to Formia to assess damage done to Villa Irlanda.
11 August 1944 – Liberation of Florence.
August-September 1944 – Irish nuns belonging to the Little Company of Mary caught up in the battle for Fiesole, which results in extensive damage to the community’s premises, the Villa San Girolamo.
11-12 October 1944 – Destruction in an air raid of the factory near Bologna belonging to the Robb brothers from Co. Down.
12 October 1944 – Darina Laracy returns to Rome with Italian writer Ignazio Silone, who she marries two months later.
October 1944 – Vincenzo Berardis, whose post as Italian minister in Dublin had been revoked by the Badoglio government, returns to Rome to explain his activities in favour of the Fascist regime while in Ireland.
16 October 1944 – Rosminian priest Daniel Sloan and a group of Italian partisans cross into Switzerland, avoiding capture by Fascists.
28 April 1945 – Summary execution of Benito Mussolini by Italian partisans
29 April 1945 – Representatives of German forces sign surrender in Italy. Surrender becomes effective 2 May.
26 May 1945 – Americans arrest Charles Bewley in Merano. Handed over to the British, he is held in an internment camp in Terni in central Italy until December.
30 August 1946 – Dressed as a monk, Fascist bigwig Edmondo Rossoni flees Rome for Dublin.
Roman imbroglio 
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