MONTE SAN MARTINO, ITALY

4 years ago, in July 2019, just prior to my Cancer Diagnosis and the World shutting down with Covid, I was lucky enough to discover a small village in Italy called Monte San Martino while holidaying close by in the foothills of the Sibillini Hills in Le Marche, at the home of an old school friend.

I had just started investigating the wartime exploits of my father and had discovered that he had been a Prisoner of War (POW) in Fontanellato, near Parma in Italy.

Unfortunately, as I was just starting out on my journey to piece together my Dad’s wartime experiences in 2018, the Monte San Martino Trust had been celebrating the 75^th Anniversary of the Italian Armistice, and this had taken place in September 2018 in Fontanellato, the very Prison Camp my father had been a POW.

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But there had been several other Anniversaries in Fontanellato that I had known nothing about. The first that I came across was when I first stood outside the gates of Dad’s wartime prison, the “Orfantario” (The Orphanage), in 2019 while Rex and I had been driving from Lucca to Verona, which indicated the 40^th Anniversary had taken place on “11 SETTEMBRE 1983”. Although the date below it appeared to indicate 11^th September 1965?!

Then notably the 60^th Anniversary which also took place in Fontanellato in September 2003.

PG 49 –  FONTANELLATO, ITALY –  60 Years on – WW2 Escape Lines Memorial Society

And inside the building yet another plaque that indicated the 70^th Anniversary that had been celebrated in Fontanellato on 8^th September 2013.

But this year, 2023, will mark the 80^th Anniversary of the Italian Armistice on 8^th September 1943 and I am lucky enough to be returning to the area we visited in 2019 known as Le Marche (pronounced luh mahr-kay) to join in with those celebrations in the villages of Servigliano and Monte San Martino that are being co-ordinated by the Monte San Martino Trust in conjunction with the Escape Lines Memorial Society (E.L.M.S.) and the Casa Della Memoria Association.

The Monte San Martino Trust was started by Keith Killby, a former inmate of the nearby POW Camp (PG 59) at Servigliano, who had sought shelter in the nearby village of Monte San Martino shortly after the release of the prisoners into the Italian countryside.

And it is the Trust that has provided me with snippets of information about my father and the time he spent as a POW, together with a few pieces of the jigsaw that saw him being released and his subsequent journey through the Italian countryside in his attempts, presumably, to reach England. Or at the very least re-uniting with Allied forces in Italy or reaching the wartime sanctuary and safety of neutral Switzerland.

This website that I have created tells of my own journey of discovery in piecing together this puzzle in the hope that it provides us with a glimpse into the extraordinary kindnesses and sacrifices that were made by so many Italian families who provided the nourishment and shelter that thousands of Allied soldiers received after their release from captivity.