Coriolano Caprara, Gino to his friends, is 92, speaks fluent English and has kept up an intense correspondence with his acquaintances abroad for years. He lived in the UK only once, seventy years ago, as a prisoner of war. Nonetheless, this was the single event that gave him some of the strongest friendships he has ever had, almost all with people who were on the other side of the barbed wire.

Coriolano arrived in Scotland after a three months journey from Libya, where he was captured in 1941, circumnavigating the whole of Africa. He was registered for the first time in Edinburgh and received a uniform, marked by three circles on his back. Coriolano thought they were simply to indicate his status as a P.O.W., but they were also designed to make shooting him easier, if he should decide to escape.

He was destined for Orkney. On arrival, he saw half the islands deserted, the other half in constant activity involving cranes, anti-aircraft defences, warships. To Coriolano, it seemed that part of the archipelago was building a new island, and another was defending its construction. Indeed, he was not far from the truth.

In those years, in fact, the British government was building what became known as the “Churchill Barriers”, to protect Scapa Flow, which hosted the British navy’s war fleet.

Coriolano was there because the British government faced increasing difficulties in finding British labourers willing to work at the barriers in the often harsh conditions of the North Sea. Hence the decision to transport 600 of the thousands of Italian prisoners taken during the North African Campaign at the beginning the war. Coriolano was among them and was assigned to Camp 34 on the Isle of Burray. He could see the other Italian camp, Camp 60, on Lamb Holm. He was luckier, as he had a few houses and fields around. Lamb Holm is little more than a rock, the prisoners of war camp the only building at the time.

He was assigned to camp duty, but not everyone was as fortunate as he; while he studied English, cleaned the camp and prepared pieces of theatre to entertain the prisoners, they worked in the quarries. He heard their tales, saw them excavating the blocks and transporting them onto the barriers that they were constructing day by the day. When the prisoners understood that they were working on military defences, they started a strike that only weeks of negotiation would bring to a halt. Nevertheless, one day after the other, Coriolano witnessed Lamb Holm and Burray coming closer, almost touching each other. It seemed as though one Italian camp was trying to reach the other.

As spring came, life in Camp 60 improved. In that archipelago isolated from everything, Italians and British men seemed to have forgotten being on the opposite sides of the war.

Coriolano spoke good English by then, and had a few evenings out. He met an Orkney family, the Wylies, who invited him for dinner. It was a pleasant night, and they told him «please come again». Coriolano did not want to behave inappropriately though, and did not go back. After a few days, he found them in front of the camp’s gate:

«What’s your problem? Why have you given us a wide berth? Haven’t you been properly brought up »
«I didn’t want to bother you…»
«Don’t be ridiculous. Come and have dinner with us».

ne of his friends asked if he could use a bike belonging to neighbouring farmer, a wreck almost impossible to rebuild. He fixed it perfectly and cycled around the island on it, cutting people’s hair. Another made cigarette lighters, another toys with recovered wood and they both sold these. And so did many

others, who became close friends with the people of Orkney, and vice versa. The population which had been isolated by the war for years was clearly charmed by these young Italians, Mediterranean and tempered by their misadventures. As the Northern Lights became rarer towards winter with the shortening nights, love stories were born, flings then encouraged by spring, mitigating the islands’ cold. The chill was not important though, as long as they were not caught.

Both the camps started building a chapel. Camp 34’s was beautiful but, as Coriolano heard, the one in Camp 60 was simply astonishing. An artist, Domenico Chiocchetti, was working on it almost full-time. He began with a statue portraying Saint George and the dragon, representing the war and the prisoners on Orkney. Indeed, it still has its baroque dynamism, and its soul and body in concrete and barbed wire. Underneath, Domenico placed a bottle with all the names of the Italian POWs in the camps, including that of Coriolano.

He was able to see the chapel on the occasions when he was allowed to go to the other camp, like during the Sports Day, when the British officers challenged the Italian prisoners to an athletic competition. At first he was disappointed; the façade was still missing, and what he could see from the outside was no different from the Nissen Hut in which they slept, perhaps a bit longer.

Inside, however, it was simply breath-taking.

In 1943, the armistice changed the situation and many Italians left, Coriolano included. Chiocchietti, conversely asked to stay, to complete his chapel. The façade and baptistery were still missing and he was building a small bell tower with the suspension from a truck. It is still there today, the spiral spring inside a little bouncy, but very elegant.

Giuseppe Palumbi, Chiocchetti’s friend, was finishing the internal decorations in wrought iron, and had even less reason to leave. He had a wife waiting for him in Italy, but the love of his life was on Orkney. He knew that when he left, all that he would be able to keep of her would be the memory of her eyes, and a photo.

Coriolano spent his last two years in the UK in Lancashire, where he benefitted from great freedom. He was paid in real currency, could go out at will during the day from the RAF base where he worked and he had the opportunity to meet several people. One friendship in particular became very strong and it was this Englishman, the local church organist, who played at Coriolano’s wedding. For decades, they visited each other, turnabout, almost every year.

Yet, it took him almost fifty years to come back to Orkney because, as did many veterans, he believed everything had been destroyed. On the contrary, The Chapel had been preserved; he discovered by chance in a newspaper that Chiocchetti had stayed on after the war and the closure of the camp to complete it.  Finishing the façade and painting it red and white, putting a bell in the tower which had remained silent during their imprisonment. When the camps were closed and the land given back to the islanders, the chapel in Camp 34 was destroyed. No one had gone inside and seen the fine decorations made by Pennisi, the other artist among the prisoners. A British officer saw the red and white façade at Camp 60, and decided to stop the work. He did not dare to touch such an oeuvre, and tried everything to save the chapel. Chiocchetti thanked him for this for the rest of his life: he was so passionate about the chapel, that he came back to see and restore it until his health no longer allowed him to do so.

Coriolano went to Orkney one, two, four times, meeting veterans, mates, friends. While chatting he heard their memories and little secrets, such as that of Palumbi, the blacksmith of the Italian Chapel.

He was probably the person who missed Orkney the most, because of the woman he was forced to leave behind. He went back to Italy in 1945, when it was impossible to delay his departure any longer. He showed his wife the photo of his island lover; as he would have expected, she burned it.

Nevertheless, he kept alive his love for this forbidden and distant woman for years, even secretly asking his daughter to name his granddaughter after her. But the greatest secret was given to the Italian chapel in Orkney.

On going inside the chapel, he knew that everyone would focus on the beautiful frescos by Chiocchetti above the altar. Palumbi instead told his lover to take the small wrought iron gates he had made in her hands, and look down. Closing them, she would have seen the two ends coming together, in the shape of a heart.
The same Giuseppe Palumbi left in Orkney, in the spring of 1945.

— Photo: the construction works of the Churchill Barriers in Orkney. Courtesy of the Orkney Library & Archive in Kirkwall.