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most ancient and illustrious families in Italy, which, today, is extinct. The buildings which faced the castle had deep, shadowy arcades under which there were shops and cafés where farmers used to congregate on Saturday, which was market day; and in the street which led to the santuario and the orfanotrofio , there was a war memorial of the First World War, which for Italy had been much more bloody than the one she was at present engaged in, with a long list of dead on a plaque at the foot of it. This was more or less all we knew about Fontanellato. Apart from a senior officer who had been taken on a tour of the village for some reason, none of us had ever seen it. What I have written is the sum total of what hetold us when he returned. It was rather like listening to a lecture by some medieval traveller and hearing him say, as he pointed to the map, ‘Here be dragons’.
    Living in such a grandiose-looking building we felt that we could scarcely be regarded as objects of compassion by the local inhabitants. Although some officers when they arrived at it from other camps complained about the overcrowding, which was severe, and the lack of privacy, which was complete, to me and most of my friends who had been brought here from a much more primitive camp, it seemed a luxurious place and we were very surprised to find that we were to sleep in beds instead of the double-tiered bunks to which we were accustomed.
    When we first arrived, at the beginning of March, there was no space for exercise outdoors, apart from a small, wired-in compound behind the building in which we assembled twice a day to be counted, or more frequently if the Italians suspected that someone had escaped; but the Italian commandant, an old, regular colonello , allowed parties of prisoners to go for route marches in the surrounding countryside once a week under a general parole, which covered the period when we were actually outside the gates. Parole or not, we were heavily guarded during these excursions which always followed routes along unfrequented lanes far from any village.
    We looked forward to these outings which were sometimes cancelled at the eleventh hour for unexplained reasons, or because the senior officers refused to come to terms on some piddling point of military etiquette which most of the people in the camp, being temporary soldiers, and almost none of the Italians, because there were only about two regular soldiers among them, were ever able to comprehend. As in every other prison camp, the most lively differences of opinion between the senior British officer and the colonello and his staff arose over the interpretation of thevarious clauses of the Geneva Convention, which governed the treatment of prisoners.
    We marched at a tremendous rate, glad of the exercise and taking sadistic pleasure in exhausting our guards who were mostly small men with short legs. We marched along flat, dusty roads; past wheat fields; fields in which forests of Indian corn were growing and into which I longed to take flight; along the foot of high green embankments which protected the land from the torrents which at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the River Po; past huge fields of tomato plants and sugar beet, groves of poplars, endless rows of vines and great rambling farmhouses with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese, and red-roofed barns with open doors in which we could just see great, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semi-darkness. Where we went we saw very few people. Perhaps they were told to keep out of the way when we went past.
    Looking at this burgeoning countryside in the spring and summer of 1943 it was difficult for the most optimistic of us to believe that Italy was in danger of collapsing through lack of food, although it was obvious that the Italian army was very badly fed. One had only to look at the exiguous rations which the soldiers who guarded us drew from their cookhouse. And here, so