Ruth Murphy
‘Allied Imprisonment in Italy’ Conference
Bari and Altamura, 26-27 February 2026
One thing I think every researcher will agree on is that the topic you are studying quickly becomes a pair of glasses through which you see differently. So, when I arrived in Milano Stazione Centrale, on my way to Bari and Altamura for a series of events on Allied Imprisonment in Italy, I marvelled at its imposing fascist architecture.
I had passed through the station before, but had not noticed it, and I wondered whether many Italians think about it as they rush to catch their trains. (Wikipedia now tells me that its Sala Reale, not usually open to the public, has swastikas fixed into the wooden floor, conceived to welcome Hitler).
Thoughts of the country’s complex and tangled history in the Second World War accompanied the landscape on my seven-hour train journey to Bari. For the following four days, from research the next morning in Bari’s state archive to my visit to PG Camp 65 before heading to the airport, this history took paper, concrete and human form.
The event in Bari and Altamura, on February 26 and 27, was the second of a series of three designed to promote the ‘Allies in Italy’ website created by the Parri Institute, MSMT’s partner in Italy. It followed a conference in Fontanellato in November 2025 and precedes one in Colfiorito.
This event focused on the three PoW camps that once existed in the area: Camp 65 in Gravina-Altamura, the largest of its kind in Italy, transit Camp 75 in Bari, and PG 204, a military hospital in Altamura. But while I was there, happenstance revealed other sites of memory. A sciopero (strike) led me to spend borrowed time snooping around an abandoned mill beside the (almost equally abandoned) train station of Gioia del Colle; Domenico Bolognese, the unofficial custodian of Camp 65, later told me that the mill is known locally to have been used as an internment camp in 1940 for up to 59 Italian Jews.
It is largely thanks to Domenico’s grassroots work that Camp 65 and its stories are being actively remembered. He features in historian and writer Malcolm Gaskill’s recent book The Glass Mountain, which relates the story of Malcolm’s great-uncle Ralph’s escape from Camp 65 and that of Malcolm’s own Italian helper – Domenico. PoW Ralph Corps is now back in Altamura, in the form of a recent series of murals dedicated to ‘65ers’ (inmates of Camp 65) on the outskirts of the town.
I was continually impressed by the granularity of the work presented at each event. Giuliano De Felice, a contemporary archaeologist, showcased his fascinating excavation of parts of Camp 65, virtually reconstructing its murals from their traces and using the camp’s detritus to tell the story of its afterlives.
Local photographer Laura Squicciarini has published a collection of photographs that depict the ruins of Camp 65 and its visitors as they remember their forebears who were once inmates. These were on display in Altamura as part of an exhibition on the theme of migrants in the town’s history (Camp 65 was later used as a refugee centre). The last room contained a series of portraits of current immigrant altamurani by another local photographer, Francesca Zaccaria, a step from the past to the present that I found very moving.
These are just some of the initiatives that show how the memory of the camps and their Allied prisoners is very much alive in this part of Italy. I introduced the Trust’s work and its bursaries to groups of students there, and, given their sophisticated engagement with their local history, I am hopeful that there will be a new cohort of borsisti from Puglia in the coming years.
Left to right: Domenico Bolognese, Ruth Murphy, Vito Antonio Leuzzi, Igor Pizzirusso
Ruth Murphy presenting on the Trust’s student bursaries
