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The trouble is, it's not really possible to feature things like "Captain America helps some Italian villagers" in a way that's not either ridiculously offensive or a serious downer for a superhero movie.

It's not yet even at the point where it's purely history yet. One of the people I love most in the world is my Italian faux-grandmother, who was a girl in Italy during the war. To this day, she hates Americans even more than she hates Nazis. The Nazis were cruel and oppressive, but they had rules, and followed them, and she never saw them drunk in the street. The Americans were drunken and crude, semi-lawless, and set up a rape camp not far from her house. How she avoided ending up in it herself is a story in itself, one which in part owes something to the friendliness of Italian Fascist soldiers who taught her self-defence.

Meanwhile, the general situation for Italian people at the time was so bad that my grandfather, who was part of the Allied forces moving up through Italy at the end of the war, had screaming nightmares about the things he saw there for the rest of his life.

Superhero movies like Captain America tend to gloss the civilian suffering in wartime, and in my view, that's rather a good thing. Superhero movies are escapism. They're not supposed to hurt.