Resuming from where I left off in my piece posted in June 2024.
Family and friends of Carol Mather are walking down the Apennine Mountain range, in long-weekend trips spread over two years, tracking at least 150km of my father’s 1,000km trek south following escape from PoW camp PG49. Until the Armistice on 9th September 1943, Carol and his companion Archie Hubbard had been held captive in the camp, a former orphanage in the town of Fontanellato, near Parma. Their goal in walking south was to reach the Allied lines. However, these lines were further south than they had understood; Montgomery’s HQ being based at Campobasso, to the north of Naples. This meant a 1,000 km hike across some very challenging and mountainous terrain; to make matters worse, while in general they stayed high – sticking to the ridges, they had to descend from time to time and to cross multiple rivers, as well as several major roads carrying German transport.
By this point in their journey, a month in, they had covered close to two-thirds of the distance. For the next section their goal was to climb and traverse the Gran Sasso mountain range, rising to 2,912m, and cross the Pescara river and the Via Tiburtina running between Rome and Pescara. From there it was about a further week’s walk south to Campobasso.
Our story starts
We are in early October 1943 and Carol and Archie have left the Sibillini mountains and climbed over the mountain south of Arquata del Tronto in the Marche having just crossed the Via Salaria, the ancient road from Rome to the Adriatic heavily used by German transport; now they must head for and cross the Gran Sasso mountain range.
And this is also spring 2024, with several Mather family members and friends hot on their heels! These include Rupert, my companion from the 2023 walk, my sister Victoria and several other family members and friends.
I want to tell the story of the “rediscovery of the casa” and to this end I will interlace accounts from the two time periods, as well as an account from 1953 when Carol, driving through Italy, tracked down one of the families that had helped him. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, two of his grandchildren, Toby and Sasha, along with myself, friends, and two guides, rediscovered that same casa in 2024. We were assisted by Carol’s vivid descriptions from both 1943 and 1953, as well as by comparing post-war and modern maps. It was an intense experience, with seven of us in a minibus driving up and down the Popoli to Pescara road, tetchy but excited after a long hot day in the hills, aided by three or four different types of maps, both digital and physical.
I tell the story in the voice of the author in each case, my notes in square brackets, but first reeling through the four days that preceded our epic discovery:
Nicholas (Carol’s son)
In May and June 2024, we resumed our tracing of Carol and Archie’s footsteps, again led by Rodolfo our local guide; Rodolfo has taken a keen interest in the story and thoroughly researched the route. His expertise allowed him to assert, sometimes with certainty, that given the topography, “they would have come this way.” The Sibillini mountain range, where we started in May, would have presented a formidable obstacle to their southward journey. So would they have travelled in the open country to its west, or though the dramatic ridges and gorges to the east? The previous year, Rupert and I had journeyed through the Castelluccio valley on the western side of Mount Sibilla; at that time, we felt “they must have come that way”. For the May trip however, we decided to explore the valleys on the eastern side of the mountain and to climb the peak from that angle, just in case the escapees might have come that way.
On the second day, we tackled Mount Sibilla itself, embarking on an extraordinary climb up a perilous ridge buffeted by gusty winds, with occasional glimpses of the Adriatic through gaps in the racing clouds.
The following day, a smaller party scrambled up the nearby Infernaccio Gorge to reach the source of the torrent. This riverine ascent provided us with a realistic impression of the conditions that Carol and Archie would have encountered had they come this way, and in general; for every mountain they descended, there was a stream or river to cross or a gorge to climb. We clambered for miles over boulders, ducking under branches and navigating steep banks. Cliff-top trees offered a dramatic vaulting over our private world whilst high dams of timber washed downstream by winter torrents frequently blocked our path. We were advised to keep our boots on, as we constantly waded through the stream; we quickly learned that it was better to have wet feet than sore ones.
In June we returned to last year’s path; staying on the first night in Amatrice, the birthplace of the famous Amatriciana pasta dish. The next day, we hiked 15 km along “Hannibal’s path”, where legends claim that the Carthaginian general crossed the Apennines fresh from his victory over the Romans at Lake Trasimeno. After climbing to Cima Lepri, a peak at 2,439 metres in the Laga mountains, we encountered a spectacular high waterfall on the east side before descending through a magnificent beech forest. The following day, we continued south, climbing approximately 13 km up from the Provvidenza Dam, meeting a herd of wild horses grazing near the summit; that night we descended to San Pietro della Ienca.
Carol resumes the story in 1943…
….so we walked on, and after four weeks had done over half the distance. Then we began to climb the great mountains that lead to the Gran Sasso d’Italia, over 10,000 feet high. In those mountains we saw and heard of a lot of other prisoners making their way down or lying up. It was quite usual to be walking along and be hailed by a shepherd – “Hey youse guys, whar’s you a goin? Well goddam youse, all the way from Parma! Son of a bitch, that’s a mighty long way, by Jimeny”. In fact, later on, it was a question of having to stop every few kilos to talk to some old boy who’d lived in America。[These were contadini peasants who had worked for a few years in the US before returning to their native Abruzzo.]
The morning we crossed the Gran Sasso we had only managed to get three potatoes to eat, but after climbing for five hours we passed over at 9,000 ft in a mist. On the other side we sat down with a shepherd lad and discussed the fine panorama to the southwest. There was Aquila with the long valley cutting down Italy which held the road and railway and many Germans. There was San Stefano way below us and the route we were to take -following just inside the Gran Sasso range as it curled down towards the southwest and Chieti. When we had dropped down to San Stefano that night we were guided to a cave where we found two British soldiers. We eat enormously there and curled up under their warm blankets. The guests were not allowed to sleep together, but Archie sIept with Mac in his bed and I slept with Jim in his, which was a pleasant change.
Nicholas – 2024
On the third morning we started our hike from Campo Imperatore just below the Gran Sasso ridge. It was from here on September 12, 1943, just a few weeks before Carol travelled through, that Mussolini was rescued from captivity by German paratroopers in a dramatic commando raid. He was held captive in a bizarre pink modernist ski hotel designed in the 1930s by Italian engineer Vittorio Bonadè Bottino.
Victoria and Nicholas (children of Carol), Toby and Sasha (grandchildren) together with friends Rupert and Adam and guides Rodolfo and Andrea, climbed that day close to the summit before rising wind speeds sent us back down.
Carol would have passed over the shoulder at a slightly lower altitude than we attained, he had no time to climb every peak! But this climb gave us an excellent taste of what crossing that huge range in all its stark grey and lime green glory would have been like for my father and his companion.
The next day we walked through gentler hills towards San Stefano, the landscape soothing to the eyes after the grey glare of the high mountains; in most of the valleys we could see the remains of the feudal Mezzadria strip farming system that Carol wrote about.
Description of the Mezzadria system (PDF, 1.1MB)
Toby (grandson) takes over the narrative
…soon we found ourselves looking down over a town called Santo Stefano di Sessanio that Grandpa describes walking down into from the hills while heading south, and being hidden by locals in a cave overnight. He likely came down the hill opposite the one we were on – we enjoyed identifying his likely path.
A woman from the town born in the same year, 1943, showed us her cellar, which she thinks is likely the sort of place where locals hid the prisoners, though we think he wrote that it was out of town. We preferred the idea of this cave!
Carol – 1943
The next morning before it was light, we splashed in the stream in the woods, stuffed as much cold macaroni into us as we were able, and were off into the hills by first light – across a high plateau all day and down into a fertile valley by evening. Here were no isolated farms, and Germans were stationed in the villages, so we found a cave, collected many grapes, nuts and tomatoes and lay eating on the grass outside our cave by the light of the young moon. Then we robbed someone’s wood pile and built a large fire inside the cave and slept as best we could, curled round the fire.
Nicholas – 2024
Our four days of walking complete but having not found the “cave” in Santo Stefano, there was a sense of unfinished business amongst the six of us as we stepped into the minibus and set the satnav for our last night in Pescara. As I read ahead in the book, I realised we were going to pass very close by the location of his second difficult river and road crossing. Could we perhaps even find “the casa” where they found shelter after the crossing?
Carol – 1943
The following evening we sat in a farm just above the Rome-Pescara Road, the ancient Via Tiburtina. The old padrone or master of the house, aged 78, was demonstrating to us an [African] dance which he had seen in America fifty years ago, but we still had our thoughts concentrated on the road below us. It was the main German lateral communication between both the fighting fronts. Besides the road, there was a railway and a swift and deep river – the Pescara, so it was undoubtedly a line which they would attempt to hold sooner or later. For us, the sooner we were across this obstacle the better. Once beyond this line it was about a week’s marching to Campobasso, which we believed to be in our hands. The obstacles ahead included five rivers, several roads and one big range of mountains – the Maiella, which rose to 8,000 ft.
“The road is dangerous” they said, “Aspett – wait, wait for only two days and then your friends will be here. Only wait and we will feed you in a cave, otherwise you will be taken by the Germans”. Always we were warned of the dangers ahead, but as so often they did not materialise. Thus, from a high wooded eminence, we lay and watched the German transport crawl by. Where the railway bridge crossed the river we could see no German guards, so we would try to cross there, then follow the riverbank for 200 yards and move towards the road where a fold in the ground gave us some good cover. I would cross the river first and wait for Archie on the far bank. All went according to plan. We crossed the river, railway and road without any trouble and took shelter from the rain in a casa on the far side, barely 300 yards away from the road, and congratulated ourselves on this feat. The inhabitants were very friendly and fed us, and as it was still raining, invited us to spend the night, although it was only late afternoon. Disregarding one of our principal rules we agreed to do so. Not only that but we slept in a bed in the farmhouse! Archie and I and the son of the house, a goatherd, were put in a large double bed next to the salone. We went to bed early and soon the watchdog started barking. The padrone ran out and said to two figures in the dark “No Fear there are no Germans here!” But the figures were two German soldiers, who demanded entry into the room next to ours, loudly asking for olive oil. We could not move for fear the house was surrounded. We just lay doggo. To placate them our host offered them a meal which seemed to last an age. We could hear every word they said. They demanded olive oil again and were about to search the house when they suddenly decide to clear off. We slept undisturbed except for the fleas which bit like dogs. [The next morning]…the goatherd led us up the hill. We were glad to shake the dust off our feet but we were in a very exposed position.
Carol – 1953
Ten years later, in 1953, I was motoring down Italy with Philippa, my wife, to take up a military attaché post at the British Embassy, Athens. It seemed a golden opportunity to look up and, hopefully, repay some of the hospitality and shelter that we had received during our escape down Italy. The problem was how should we find these people? No names had been written down, nor sketch maps kept. Most of the casa had been well off the beaten track. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. There was only one casa of which I could positively fix a position. This farmhouse was near where the railway line crosses the River Pescara, the house where we encountered the German patrol and had been surprised in bed.
Philippa and I had now left Rome and were motoring along the road to Pescara, the very road above which Archie and I had lain in wait watching the German traffic. Suddenly, it all came back to me and I jammed on the brakes. We had passed the railway bridge and there was the track up which we must have gone. We parked the car, full of our belongings being transported to Greece, as best we could by the narrow roadway. Philippa and I scrambled up the track -200-300-400 yards and I began to think I was mistaken. Then, suddenly, there it was, the old farmhouse just as dilapidated as when I had last seen it. We knocked at the door, it creaked open. I began my long-rehearsed speech ‘Ecco! Prigoniori di guerra .. . , quarante-tre!’
The door flew open! Looks of disbelief! Arms were flung round us. Embraces all round. They remembered! It was the same family, but our goatherd boy had emigrated to Australia. We were dragged inside and there by the familiar hearthside we were entertained to a feast. Then the whole family accompanied us down the track again, talking and laughing excitedly. When we got to the car we wondered what we could possibly give them. Our brand-new travelling rugs, a recent wedding present, was the answer, and these we pressed upon them, more as a souvenir than a reward. They were overcome. And that moment made it all worthwhile.
Toby – 2024
With some difficulty we found the renovated farmhouse where we believe Grandpa stayed overnight after crossing a crucial road that led from Rome to Pescara, after watching from the hills above on his “high eminence”, and crossing a river, railway and this road, teeming with Germans. After a lot of hunting on maps new and old we matched his description to a map location and followed the path up, ‘a 300 yard scramble’ matching his description. The new owners told us it had been a ruin when they bought it decades later. Grandpa described it as very run-down back then, inhabited by peasant farmers. It is now an Agriturismo. You can stay where Grandpa likely slept, though with less of a fear factor today. As we drove in, the first thing we saw was a car with German number plates, and two elderly Germans walked past us…perhaps not quite old enough to have been the ones manning the road below! If you look on Google maps north to south you can see where he walked down and crossed the road and river etc to this point (opens in new tab).
Nicholas
It was an extraordinarily intense afternoon. Our joy at finding the track and the casa is hard to communicate, especially after a hot day’s walking. And the irony of finding German tourists parked outside the house!
If you look at the two maps below, one from the immediate post-war period and one from today, you will see how few houses there were in the mid-1950s when we think the map was made. Our minibus team of digital and analog researchers found at least three places close to Popoli where the railway crosses both the river and the road, and since then a new fast road had been built and criss-crosses the river.
The steep terrain made our search easier as it limited areas where houses could be built, but above all it was the detailed descriptions in my father’s two accounts, in particular the description of the “high eminence” and the “fold in the ground”, where they hid after crossing the river which gave us certainty. We were aided by access to a digital version of the post-war map that Rodolfo, ever resourceful, had on his phone; this allowed us to come up trumps.
Postscript(s)
Unfortunately the family who owned the casa were in no way related to the family who so bravely and generously opened their simple home to Carol and Archie, at considerable risk to their own lives; we were told that the original tenants had “gone away” after the war, whether to join their goatherd son in Australia or just to find work in an Italian city they did not know. My father’s account of the feudal Mezzadria system, linked above, provides a nostalgic account of what was a huge movement away from the old share-cropping life after the war, and no doubt this brave family was part of that wave. The charming owners, who bought the house “from the Contessa” in the 1980s found the casa in ruin and with a pine tree growing through the roof.
By this point in the war Carol had fought alongside David Stirling in the SAS desert airfield raids, and rested under Monty’s caravans marking up the maps of the progress of the Battle of El Alamein. He was well used to the importance of detail and was a great lover of nature. His father Loris had been a friend of Baden-Powell, a scout and a keen bird watcher. Carol and his elder brother Bill and sister Gay had spent so many holidays camping, that “outdoors” was their natural milieu. And he was young, just 24 years old, younger than Toby and Sash. And an escapee, having survived many close scrapes, living off the land and not far from the Allied lines. It was good to be alive!
Now safely across the heavy-trafficked valley road, Carol and Archie would head for the Allied lines. But to get there, they’d have to go through the back of the enemy line and face further obstacles. As Carol wrote: “The obstacles ahead included five rivers, several roads and one big range of mountains – the Maiella, which rose to 8,000 ft”
In 2025, we will continue with the last section of the walk. We will report back!
Botanical note from Victoria Harley
Nicholas has spoken of our father’s love of nature. During the six days that I spent with Nicholas in 2024 retracing our father’s footsteps, apart from the thrill of the landscape and the connection to our father, a particular pleasure was to see and document the breathtaking array of flora to be found in the mountains in May and June, and I thought perhaps that other plant lovers might be interested in my records. For those of us on the 2024 expeditions who just might have become a little breathless during the various challenging ascents, pausing to admire the constantly changing tapestry of wildflowers happily served more than one purpose!
