MOUNTAIN FASTNESSES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 42, 21 January 1944, Page 6

MOUNTAIN FASTNESSES

THE TRIGNO AND THE SANGRO

(Official War Correspondent) Central Ittaly,, Dee* 17. After Foggia is passed on tlvc journey l northwards, the. coastal plain grows ever narrower, hard pressed by the. foothills of the central mountain masses. A new phase of Italy meets the eyes, Avherc on the left the hills rise in irregular ranles to the. clouds. Back in those hills. maii3 r ' of which cxccetl 3000 feet in height, are a host of small villages,, in which life has changed little in a thousand years. Typical of these is Lucera, on the road from Foggia to Naples. Away back in the times of the ancient Romans, a skilled, architect of war chose a dominating peak for a stronghold from which to command the entire valley. Lucera has been a fortress - from then until the. most recent times, and its narrow streets and buttresses exude the age-old atmosphere of siege and camp. The fortress, crowning the peak, and separated from the adjacent high ground by an impressive moat„ dwarfs even the Citadel of Aleppo, lit took us fully half an hour to walk around; those frowning walls. Quite a lot of the original Roman work remains, the most striking part of which is the keep. Over a thousand years later the Normans, added towers, which to-day arc not in as good a state of preservation as 1 the earlier fort. While making this diversion, we also visited Pietra and Castelnuovo, the scene of much hill lighting earlier in the campaign. Pietra is at once the most picturesque and the dirtiest village I have ever seen, Egypt included. It boasts a fine Norman tower over a thousand years old —the ancestral home of the dukes of Pietra. The title lapsed quite recently by the old. Continental law of male descent,, and the best use to which the inhabitants could put the tower was to house pigs in at. This is: a good thing in its way, tor it keeps at least some of a huge porcine tribe off "the 1 street (which incidentally r is also the main sewer), and from under the wheels of passing jeeps. After seeing Pietra I am crossing Italian pork off my menu. To reach Castelnuovo we climbed the side, of a 3000-foot ridge, and from then on the novelty of these hilltop towns began to die. Every one of them .was originally built with an eye to defence : every one has its narrow cobbled streets, its old castle, and its 1 church; every one covers every available inch of ground, and hangs by its buttresses over the void below. In this country, where from one mountain peak you can see half a dozen strongholds, each looking like a fairytale fantasy.. you soon become satiated with the picturesque. Castelnuovo's church, built just 744 years ago,, was only a minor wonder. Back on the main road at tht grubby little town of San Severe, we pushed on towards Termoli, scene of desperate fighting some weeks before. The country was; rugged and broken, but cultivated on every hand. The übiquitous Baily bridge spanned many a torrent where the enemy had inad,e good his demolitions. Here and there shellholes and bomb-craters churned the soft soil into mud. Termoli itself from the distance is vaguely like Tobru-k, despite the. greenness of the countryside. Paddocks of churned mud,, battered wrecks: of vehicles, gutted buildings, and the graves, of friend and. foe intermingled, told of the 1 vicious street fighting. Northwards from the Trigno todwards San Salvo and the Sangro battle signs were ever more frequent. The hulls of enemy tanks lay about like great beetles trodden on by a giant foot —our old friends the. Ml-: SII and IV Special. Piles; of 2fj-pdr. cases, hastily-dug gunpits, and waterlogged trenches in the rich ground of little valleys that were. more, like green-clad wad is,, marked the way to San Salvo. We were within striking distance of the German lines, from where the. constant roll of gunfire could be heard above, the drumming of the jeep's motor.