Eric Newby - What the Traveller Saw

And as we chugged into the harbour of Catania I had my first sight of an Italian city beside the sea, as I had always imagined it would be, just as Rex Whistler might have painted it, with baroque domes and Renaissance palazzi , all golden in the early morning sun.

We were hurried off the boat and up through narrow streets to a Fascist headquarters with a picture of II Duce on the wall where, minus our trousers, which we had lost at sea, we met our first Blackshirts. They consigned us to a fortress in the moat of which one of their number, more excited than the rest, said we would be shot at dawn the following day. In spite of not knowing until some time later that this fate had befallen a previous party, we believed him. But we weren’t shot. Instead we were taken to Rome and kept prisoners in the barracks of a posh cavalry regiment. Here we tasted our first, real Italian food. It came from the officers’ mess and was delicious, pasta and peperoni , and our first Italian wine. From the window of my room, which was high up under the eaves and very hot, all I could see of Rome was an officer exercising a charger of the tan in a courtyard. A whole decade was to pass before I would again visit Rome in August.

In the spring of 1943, about nine months after I was captured, a number of us were sent to a rather superior prison camp situated in what is known as the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the River Po flows on its way from its source in the Cottian Alps on the French frontier to the Adriatic. This camp was in a disused orphanage on the edge of a large village called Fontanellato, which is now very close to the Autostrada del Sole, and the nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road that runs through the pianura in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.

There, once a week, parties of us were allowed to go for route marches in the surrounding country under a general parole that we would not try to escape, but we were nevertheless still heavily guarded. The route chosen deliberately avoided villages.

We walked along flat, dusty roads on which we rarely saw a motor car, only cyclists and carts drawn by oxen; past wheat fields, fields where what resembled miniature forests of maize (Indian corn) were growing, in which I longed to hide myself and make my escape. We marched along the foot of high, grass-grown embankments, known as argine , built to protect the land from the torrents that at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the nearby River Po, and also from the Po itself, a powerful, dangerous and unpredictable stream.

We also saw fields of tomato plants that when ripe would be used to make salsa di pomodoro , sugar beet, groves of poplars, the trunks of which, soaring up overhead, were like the pillars in a cathedral, endless rows of vines which produced the naturally fizzy red wine known as Lambrusco. And we saw rambling, red-tiled farmhouses, some of them very large, with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese and the inevitable savage dog on a running wire. And there were barns, sometimes with open doors, through which we could see big, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semidarkness. We were permanently hungry and it was strange to think that, apart from the meals I had been served in the cavalry barracks in Rome, I had never eaten a proper Italian meal in Italy – all the food I had eaten in the prison camps had been cooked by British cooks.

On these walks we saw very few people, probably they were ordered to make themselves scarce. Most of those we did see were contadini , bent double working in the fields and all wearing straw hats with huge brims to protect themselves from the fearful heat of the sun. Sometimes they waved but because of these hats it was difficult to know who waved, men or women or both. Others, women and girls mostly, seen momentarily through half-closed green shutters on the upper floors of the farmhouses, also waved a bit apprehensively. No one was obviously unfriendly. And in all these expanses of pianura there was not a tractor to be seen.

Our presence in the orphanage provoked lively interest among the inhabitants of our village, Fontanellato, and as the local cemetery was located alongside the orphanage large numbers of them, most of them women, both old and young (the young men were mostly in the armed forces), some of them on bicycles, took more numerous opportunities to pay their respects to the dead than they had done before we arrived on the scene. In fact I first saw the girl I was subsequently to marry on her way to the cemetery with a group of friends, all of them on bikes. I waved to her from one of the windows overlooking the main road. She waved back and I was shot at by a sentry who was careful to miss, which was a warning against looking out of those particular windows.

On 8 September 1943 the Italian government asked for an armistice. On the following day we all broke out of the orphanage with the connivance of the Italian commandant and took to the countryside to avoid being sent to Germany, which we did by a hair’s-breadth.

It was an extraordinary situation. Up to this moment, apart from various interrogators and members of the camp staff with whom we came in contact, few if any of us had ever spoken to an Italian since we had been captured. Now, suddenly, we found ourselves more or less surrounded by the sort of people we had seen working in the fields and riding bikes up the road to the cemetery, most of whom seemed anxious to help us, not, most of them, for any political motive, but because, as they told us, they too had sons and brothers away at the war, many of whom had not been heard of for a long time.

So far as I was concerned the first Italians I now met appeared in the following order: an Italian soldier who led me out of the camp on a mule because I had sprained my ankle and couldn’t walk (he then went off with it – ‘Vado a casa,’ he said, ‘I’m going home’); next were a farmer and his wife who hid me in their barn for that first night, who had a son and a daughter; then there was the girl to whom I had waved, by sheer coincidence, who brought me clothes, including one of her father’s suits – he was the village schoolmaster; there was a Sicilian doctor, a great friend of the schoolmaster, who arranged for me to be hidden in the maternity ward of the local hospital; then there was its mother superior and various nuns, an elderly male nurse called Giulio who looked and sounded a bit like a walrus, and Maria, a mongoloid child, a permanent member resident in this ospedale , who was immensely strong, highly affectionate and used to prove it by going through the motions of strangling me with one of her pigtails, creeping up behind me like a miniature Italian version of an Indian thug.

Until now my fellow prisoners and I had thought of Italians, rather arrogantly, more or less as figures of fun.

We were arrogant because this was one of the few ways in which we could vent our spleen at having been captured, and at the same time keep up our spirits, which were really very low. Before the armistice it is believed that, in spite of innumerable attempts to do so, only two allied prisoners of war actually succeeded in escaping from Italy. This was because Italians of all sorts and conditions were, and are, extraordinarily observant, and all the ingenious subterfuges, disguises and false documents which might have satisfied a German or an English official were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to satisfy even the most myopic Italian ticket collector. It was not only officials. The kind of inspection an allied escaper was subjected to by other travellers in an Italian train compartment would usually be enough to finish him off.

Now, all of a sudden, these same Italians were risking their lives for us, and as I was passed from one helper to the next I began to feel rather like a fragile parcel on its way to some distant delivery point.