Selection of images
Photos selected and commented by Professor Nigel Pollard, Swansea University
Benevento Duomo
The cathedral at Benevento was severely damaged by Allied bombing in September 1943. The bombing sought to destroy transportation targets (bridges and railway marshalling yards) to prevent German supplies and reinforcements for their counter-attack against the Allied beachhead in the Gulf of Salerno. However, the limited accuracy of bombing at the time led to numerous civilian casualties and widespread damage. The 1945 British publication Works of Art in Italy: Losses and Survivals in the War notes ‘the lower town between the DUOMO and the PONTE VANVITELLI has been obliterated [and is] a mass or ruins’. This photograph is undated, but by the time it was taken, some of the rubble appears to have been cleared and sorted for future restoration.
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US monuments officer Lt. Frederick Hartt with crated works of art at Campo Tures, Alto Adige.
In May 1945 Allied forces overran depots at San Leonardo and Campo Tures in Alto Adige that contained works of art that had been appropriated by German forces. Much of this art had originally come from Florence, by way of refuges outside the city to which it had been evacuated earlier in the war by Italian authorities. Here US monuments officer Lt. Frederick Hartt is photographed (perhaps by John Ward-Perkins himself) at Campo Tures alongside some of the crated paintings that subsequently were returned to Florence. At San Leonardo, the MFAA officers discovered not just art, but also officers of the Kunstschutz, their German counterparts, who had been responsible for its transfer there.
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Tarquinia, museum (Palazzo Vitelleschi), façade
At the time of the Second World War, as today, the main local collection of Etruscan antiquities from Tarquinia was housed in a museum in the town’s Palazzo Vitelleschi, itself an historic (15th century) building. At an early stage of the war, Italian authorities assumed that towns such as Tarquinia were less likely to be bombed than major cities, so movable collections from the Villa Giulia museum in Rome were evacuated there. However, by late 1943, Rome was considered to be less risky as a refuge than outlying locations like Tarquinia, so not only were the Villa Giulia materials moved back to the city, but with them much of the movable collection from the Palazzo Vitelleschi itself. That was just as well, because the palace/museum was damaged by Allied tactical bombing in 1944, its collections (in Rome, and in basement storage in the museum itself) surviving largely unscathed.
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Florence, bridges demolished by German troops
While railway marshalling yards in Florence were treated as military targets and bombed by the Allies in the spring of 1944, considerable care was taken to avoid damage to the city’s historic buildings. Similarly as Allied ground forces closed in on Florence in July-August 1944, their advance was planned to encircle it rather than to attack it directly, to avoid the risk of fighting in the city. However, as they withdrew to the north, retreating German forces systematically demolished Florence’s Arno bridges to prevent Allied forces from advancing rapidly across the river to pursue. All of the historic bridges except the Ponte Vecchio were destroyed, and the approaches to that bridge were blocked by demolition that also caused great damage to historic structures. By the time this photograph was taken after the liberation of Florence, a temporary footbridge had been established on the piers of the Ponte della Trinità.
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Pompeii, House of Epidius Rufus
In August and September 1943, the archaeological site of Pompeii was struck accidentally by over 160 Allied bombs intended for road and rail targets near the town, causing substantial damage to the remains of the Roman town. The accuracy achievable with 1943 bombing technology and tactics meant that a proportion of bombs aimed at road and rail routes and intersections nearby (particularly in an attempt to stem the German counter-attack against the Salerno beachhead) inevitably hit the site. Much of the damage was in the area of the Porta Marina and the Forum, close to the targets west of the site, but houses such as the House of the Faun and (further east, in Region IX) the House of Epidius Rufus were also badly damaged. This photograph of the latter shows the severe damage to the façade and the atrium of the latter.
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