Prisoner-of-war exchange, 65 years on

The Romulus and Remus monument on Pen Hill, on the A39 above Wells, is now listed. Up there to celebrate its new status are Ian Rands, vice-chairman of the Conservation Society, which helped to restore it, Ian Gething, conservation officer for Mendip council (centre), and Tony D’Ovidio, chairman of the Romulus and Remus Fund. (Photo by Jennie Banks of the Western Gazette)

An Italian town that had a camp for English prisoners of war in the 1940s is expected to take part in a dinner at Wells Town Hall next February with former Italian prisoners who were held at Wells.

A jamboree is to follow on August 23 in 2009 above Wells at the Romulus and Remus statue built by Italian prisoners. Wells had two PoW camps, at Stoberry Park for Italians and after Normandy for Germans, and at Penleigh (the EMI site).

Fontanellato grew up around the 15th-century moated and fortified house of the Sanvitales.

The Italian town is Fontanellato, in the Po Valley near Parma, with a population like that of Glastonbury. Prisoners there were held in relative comfort, in a four-storey orphanage. The travel writer Eric Newby wrote a book about his war experience, the Fontanellato prison and the local girl he married — in 2001 it became the film In Love and War.