The little church with a big history
EVERY year on the last Sunday of October members of the KwaZuluNatal Midlands Italian community hold a service to honour the homesick prisonersof-war who were inspired to build a church as a legacy of their faith 70 years ago.
Among the worshippers at this year’s commemoration ceremony in the quiet Pietermaritzburg suburb of Epworth next Sunday, will be the children and grandchildren of the Italians who built the beautiful little Roman Catholic Church that today marks the site of a World War II prisoner of war camp.
The first group of 5 000 Italian combatants captured by South African forces in East and North Africa arrived in the camp in 1941 and were at first housed in tents before being moved into wooden dormitories.
Early in 1942 the camp chaplain, Padre Giacomo Conte, suggested that artisans among the prisoners should build a church in the camp grounds to relieve their boredom.
The project might have been stillborn had it not been for the provision of basic tools and other assistance authorised by a member of the camp staff, Major BC Knight.
Even so, the difficulties were formidable. The shale blocks had to be quarried 2km away, then hauled to the building site by human muscle-power using makeshift carts.
As cement was in short supply during the war, it was mixed with mud to go further and the cement was used sparingly to “point” the joints in the face of the walls.
The Italians began work on the church on February 2, 1942, after Sergeant Ottaviano Ariello, an architect, drew the plans and acted as building supervisor. He was supported by a team of about 40 builders and craftsmen.
The church took only 13 months to build – a remarkable achievement – in a frugal architectural style. It is only 17.3m long and 7.5m wide with a clock tower 9.5m high. The cornice over the main entrance bears the inscription: MATRI DIVINAE GRATIAE CAPTIVI ITALICI AD MCMXLIV.
The ceremony of inauguration, consecration and a pontifical mass was performed on Sunday, March 19, 1944, by the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Van Gijlswijk, when he officially named the building the Church of Madonna delle Grazie (Our Lady of Mercy).
For the remaining months of the war, services were held regularly, but when the war ended the camp was disbanded, the prisoners were repatriated and the church stood alone by the roadside, forgotten and neglected.
The building and a sculpted stone lion in the churchyard could be seen from the N3 highway and, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was often occupied by tramps and vagrants who vandalised the interior.
Father Anton Dovigo was on holiday in South Africa from Italy in 1962 when he visited the diminutive church and was so shocked at its awful condition that he launched a fund for its restoration. Former prisoners in Italy and South Africa contributed to the fund and local builders donated their time and expertise for its restoration.
A new bell was cast in Italy and sent free of charge to Durban. When it arrived in Epworth, former prisoner Salvatore Fardella, who helped build the church, installed the bell in the tower.
After its restoration, the church was looked after by local Italians, who kept it clean, carried out routine repairs and provided flowers for the monthly mass.
The church, now a national monument and the responsibility of the Italian POW Church Trust, has been swallowed up by the residential suburb of Epworth but is still used for services on the last Sunday of each month and on special occasions such as funerals and weddings.
Not all the prisoners returned home. Salvatore Fardella, who was born in a village in the province of Messina, served as an infantryman in the Italian army in North Africa. He was taken prisoner after being wounded in action, treated in a Cairo military hospital and then sent to the POW camp in Pietermaritzburg.
After working on Our Lady of Mercy Church, he was one of many prisoners employed on local farms and helped to build the Lythwood Country Lodge near Lidgetton in the Midlands. He settled in Howick, started his own construction business and later established a hardware store and builders’ warehouse with his brother, who arrived in Howick in 1965. The business is now operated by their sons.
Another prisoner who chose to remain in South Africa after the war was Gregorio Fiasconaro, a baritone from Genoa who made his debut in 1937 as an opera principal in the role of Germont in La Traviata.
When his singing career was interrupted by the war, he trained as a pilot and joined a squadron in East Africa. Taken prisoner after being shot down and wounded, he was sent first to Egypt and then to Pietermaritzburg.
Fiasconaro was made the camp’s director of entertainment and was responsible for producing plays and concerts. He played the harmonium in the camp church on Sundays and often put on shows in the Pietermaritzburg City Hall with other prisoners to raise money for the Red Cross.
It was while singing in one of these concerts towards the end of the war that Fiasconaro met and fell in love with a South African woman, Mabel Brabant.
They were married in 1947 and settled in Durban, where he became a well-known singing teacher. He also sang with the orchestras of Cape Town, Joburg and Durban.
In the 1950s Fiasconaro brought entire opera productions from Italy and staged them at the old Alhambra Theatre in Durban’s Berea Road.
Known as the “father of opera in South Africa,” he staged 125 productions of 51 operas in South Africa – a remarkable achievement.
• One of the memorials in the cemetery of the Italian POW Church in Pietermaritzburg commemorates Italians who died when a German U-boat mistakenly sank a British troop carrier, the SS Nova Scotia, on November 28, 1942.
The ship sailed from Massawa in Italian East Africa with 765 Italian prisoners-of-war, 134 British and South African soldiers and 110 crew. It was heading for Durban when it was torpedoed 40km off the Zululand coast and blew up within 10 minutes.
Realising the submarine captain’s error, the German U-boat command notified the Portuguese authorities in Mozambique and a rescue ship was sent from Lourenco Marques (Maputo). The Alfonso du Albuquerque reached the scene next day, rescued 192 survivors and took them to Mozambique.
An estimated 645 Italians died in the sinking, with many bodies washed onto Natal’s beaches. The remains of 120 victims were laid to rest in the Italian military cemetery in Hillary, Durban, before being re-interred in Pietermaritzburg in 2008.