MORE than 60 years ago, Guido DeBonis was one of a team of Italian prisoners of war who fashioned a small chapel out of two drab Nissen huts in Orkney.
Using scrap material from a wartime construction project, they created a masterpiece that people have marvelled at ever since.
But until recently the 89-year-old former solider had no idea the labour of love had even survived the Second World War,
far less that it had become one of the islands' most iconic buildings.
Yesterday, he made an emotional pilgrimage to the uninhabited island of Lambholm to see again the sanctuary that became known as the Miracle of Camp 60.
"I cried when I walked through the door," said Mr DeBonis, now a great-grandfather. "I was brought here in 1942 and I cannot believe it is still so beautiful after all these years."
Following the sinking of the battleship HMS Royal Oak by a German U-boat in Orkney in October 1939, with the loss of 833 lives, the prime minister, Winston Churchill, ordered the closure of the four eastern channels leading into Scapa Flow.
Work on Churchill's barriers, huge walls of rock and concrete forming causeways that linked South Ronaldsay and Burray to the Orkney mainland, began in 1940, but labour shortages forced the Balfour Beatty company to look elsewhere for a workforce.
In January 1942, 1,200 Italian PoWs captured in north Africa were brought to the islands to help the construction effort.
Some 500 were taken to Lambholm, where they set up Camp 60, just 13 small huts amid the barren landscape.
Mr DeBonis was 21 when he was captured in Egypt on New Year's Day, 1940. Shipped at first to Australia, he ended up at Camp 60.
Despite the huge effort in building the barriers, the Italians found time to make instruments for a camp band, a concrete bowling alley and a snooker table complete with concrete balls. They left a statue of St George made from barbed wire coated in concrete.
But their masterpiece was the chapel. One of the prisoners, Domenico Chiocchetti, an artist, put together a squad of plasterers, electricians and blacksmiths to design a place of worship that has since become a symbol of Orkney's modern history.
Using plaster to hide the huts' corrugated iron, they painted the interior to look like brickwork and a installed a façade with a belfry. The centrepiece was an altar with a huge mural of the Madonna and Child, painted by Mr Chiocchetti.
After Italy's capitulation in June 1943, the Italians were no longer prisoners and were employed on the same basis as British civilians.
But their lasting legacy is Orkney's most popular tourist attraction, drawing more than 90,000 visitors a year.
Mr DeBonis, from San Polo dei Cavalieri, near Rome, said: "I had no idea our church had survived for so long. When I found out it was still here I had to come back to see it for myself. I am so proud of what we did and so glad to see that it is still loved."
Mr DeBonis, who hopes to return to Orkney next year to celebrate his 90th birthday, added: "It has also brought back so many memories. I remember working in the snow and my hands cracking with the cold.
"But they gave us good warm clothes and we were well looked after, and in a funny way I remember them as happy times."
BACKGROUND
ABOUT 1,200 Italian prisoners of war formed part of the workforce to build Churchill's Barriers. A change in the description from "barriers" to "causeways" helped get around rules on prisoners working on war projects.
The barriers stretch for nearly two miles. In all, 40,000 cubic metres of rock was encased in wire cages and dropped into the water, topped with 300,000 tonnes of concrete blocks.
The structures came into use as roads after the war ended and they still form part of the islands' transport network.
Having passed their 60th anniversary in 2005, calls have been made to have the landmarks listed as a World Heritage Site.
The full article contains 696 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
