Bagnoli

A college that never opened

Demolition of the crowded Rione Castellana began on 2 January 1939 to clear ground for an institution funded by the Banco di Napoli for poor and abandoned children of Naples. Built on the San Laise hillside to the design of the engineer Francesco Silvestri between 1939 and 1940, alongside the neighbouring Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, the complex covered about thirty hectares overlooking the Gulf of Pozzuoli.

It was laid out as a small town: five dormitory blocks divided into a male and a female section, two schools, two gymnasia, two infirmaries, a Catholic church, a theatre, a stadium and sports ground, workshops, laundries and bakeries, internal roads and squares, playing fields and ground set aside for cultivation. There were places for 2,000 boys and 500 girls aged between six and eighteen. Originally called the Istituto per i figli del popolo di Napoli, it was renamed for the Fascist politician Costanzo Ciano and inaugurated on 9 May 1940 in the presence of Victor Emmanuel III.

Italy entered the war a month later and the college never took its pupils. A doctoral thesis on the site records that the Italian War Ministry occupied the complex until late 1942, that after the German takeover in 1943 it became one of their officer training schools, and that a United States Air Squadron then occupied the site for about a year. The national heritage inventory records Italian and German troops in occupation until September 1943; after the four days of Naples and the Allied entry into the city it was requisitioned by Anglo-American forces, whose occupation the inventory dates to July 1947. Bombing damaged the buildings during those years.

The Ukrainian chaplain who moved here after serving at Trani described several large, multi-storey blocks, built, as he understood it, for the Fascist youth movement. Naples could be reached by tram or on foot; from one window of his room he could see Capri and from another Vesuvius. His account places refugee life inside a substantial institutional complex, rather than a settlement of temporary tents.

The camp and who ran it

The heritage inventory records refugee occupation of the complex by the International Refugee Organisation until January 1952. The chaplain’s memoir places Ukrainians there earlier still: he left Trani in the autumn of 1946 on the last lorry out and became chaplain of what he called a large transit camp. Military occupation and refugee accommodation therefore overlapped on the same site.

The commandant was an English colonel whom the memoir names as Salomon, described as a sensible and even-tempered man who enjoyed the sympathy of the camp’s inhabitants. At their first meeting he told the chaplain that his office would be open at any hour and that he would welcome suggestions for the residents’ good. He walked round the camp himself to show which blocks the Ukrainians occupied and asked for a copy of the list of Ukrainian families and single residents, which made the chaplain’s first weeks of work much easier.

An Italian police report of 26 April 1947 recorded 2,225 people at Camp 2, Bagnoli. Local accounts of the complex give a much larger figure for the camp as a whole across its life, describing the site as holding thousands of displaced people, mostly from eastern Europe and in particular from Istria, who were being processed for Argentina, Australia, Canada and the United States.

The Ukrainian parish, choir and school

A spacious church stood in the middle of the camp. It was being used by a Croatian priest, Fr Dr Tot, and the two men agreed between them the hours of Sunday worship, so that the Ukrainian congregation had the building for its own liturgy. A choir was formed at once under the direction of Kryveshko, and the Divine Liturgy was sung every Sunday.

The memoir names singers as well as clergy: a soprano from the Poltava region called Lena, and the baritone Mykhailo Burchak, a signals NCO of the 29th regiment whom the chaplain had last seen under fire at Gleichenberg. The choral society Soborna Ukraina sang in the camp. During Lent in 1947 the chaplain invited the Redemptorist missioner Fr Mykhailo Shchudlo from Pagani, near Naples, who gave a week-long mission that the memoir credits with renewing religious life in the camp.

In Holy Week Fr Dr Ivan Prashko, later a bishop in Australia, came to hear confessions and to celebrate the services in the old Ukrainian rite. The chaplain remembered the two of them singing the Easter matins hymn “Plotiiu usnuv”, with Burchak taking the third part. A Ukrainian school was founded in the camp under the direction of Colonel Farion, and many Ukrainian children made their first communion that year.

The memoir estimates that some two thousand young Ukrainians were at Bagnoli recovering their balance after hard years and preparing to leave for overseas. The chaplain also married many former Division soldiers to Ukrainian women in the camp, so that they would sail as families rather than as single men.

Living while waiting

A separate account of an Istrian family’s stay in spring and summer 1951 describes tiny rooms with cots, tables and chairs. Partitions stopped below the ceiling, carrying sound between neighbouring rooms and giving families little privacy. Washing facilities and toilets were shared at the end of the floor.

Children spent much of the day outside. A snack bar near the central steps sold pastries and orange drinks, and loudspeakers played Neapolitan music. At mealtimes, residents queued with metal trays while cafeteria workers served their food. These details describe one family’s experience of the wider mixed camp.

Separation and illness

Conditions could be much harsher. A woman who reached Bagnoli late in 1949 with her husband and ten-month-old daughter recalled two hundred women and children housed in double bunks on each floor, the men accommodated elsewhere in the large complex with visiting rights between two and four in the afternoon, and strict curfews enforced by locking up couples found in the grounds at night. Meals came three times a day.

She remembered an epidemic of typhoid fever, children dying daily, and having to bring her child to the medical quarters every morning for a check-up. If a child was kept there, she wrote, it was most likely the last the parents saw of it; a priest would come to tell them that the child had died and had already been buried. This is a personal account of the fear surrounding illness, rather than a verified camp-wide mortality count.

Forced return and insecurity

Overseas migration was not the only possible outcome. A contemporary June 1947 report stated that people in Bagnoli’s Russian section had been moved to Rimini on 14 August 1946, where former Soviet citizens were segregated. The report described subsequent forced repatriation. This concerned a particular group and must be distinguished from the Ukrainian civilian journeys through Bagnoli.

A doctoral thesis on the history of the site records that hundreds of the displaced people at Bagnoli were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union as putative Soviet citizens, under the American Operation Keelhaul. The figure of hundreds is the thesis’s own; no separate count of those removed from Bagnoli has been established here, and the thesis does not say how many of them were Ukrainian.

From Naples to new homes

The Ukrainian memoir explicitly records refugees arriving from Austria and Germany during 1947 before boarding ships at Naples. The camp therefore formed part of an onward route through Europe; arrival here did not mean that resettlement had been completed.

Destinations could change while a family waited. The chaplain was first registered for Paraguay by Fr P. Diachyshyn, who acted as a kind of ambassador for that country in Rome, then put his name down for Argentina; in the end, after Pius XII allowed married priests to go to the United States, an affidavit arrived and the family sailed there instead.

Other testimonies show the range of routes out. The Istrian family in the 1951 account was being processed for the United States. The 1949 account follows an airlift arranged for mothers with young children, whose husbands were at first expected to travel by sea; the family left Naples on 2 December 1949 and reached Sydney on 12 December after a four-day flight by way of Nicosia, Tehran, Karachi, Singapore and Darwin, before being taken by bus through the Blue Mountains to Bathurst Reception Camp. Their luggage went to Venezuela by mistake.

The complex after the camp

The Italian heritage inventory records refugee use continuing until January 1952. After a heavy looting of the empty buildings the complex was requisitioned for the armed forces of the United States and given over to NATO’s southern command, which the inventory dates on the site from 1954 to 2013. A heliport was added, buildings were turned into offices and a bunker was built.

Five C-shaped dormitory blocks survive from the original design. One, which held the girls’ accommodation, is partly in use for film work; the other four stand disused around the central square, each with a semi-basement, a raised ground floor and two upper storeys with wide loggias looking towards Nisida. The grounds reopened to the city as the Parco San Laise and are managed by the Fondazione Banco di Napoli per l’Assistenza all’Infanzia, the body that paid for the college in the first place.