Two Nissen huts transformed into a chapel

Beside the road stands the Italian Chapel, one of Orkney's most treasured sites and a Category A listed building. It began as two corrugated-iron Nissen huts set end to end, made available to the prisoners at Camp 60 in 1943 after the camp's Catholic priest, Father Giacobazzi, and the sympathetic commandant, Major Buckland, agreed the men needed a place of worship.↗↗

What the men then created is astonishing. Working almost entirely from scrap and salvaged materials, the artist Domenico Chiocchetti and his comrades—among them cement worker Bruttapasta and blacksmith Palumbo—lined the huts with plasterboard and painted the whole interior in trompe l'oeil to read as carved stone, brickwork and a vaulted sky. Chiocchetti hand-painted the sanctuary's Madonna and Child, copying an image by Nicolò Barabino from a small prayer card his mother had pressed into his pocket before he left Italy. Palumbo forged a triple-arched wrought-iron screen; a corned-beef tin became a candle holder; the baptismal font grew from the inside of a car exhaust sheathed in concrete; the altar and holy-water stoup were moulded from cement left over from the barriers, and materials were even recovered from the blockships sunk in Scapa Flow.↗↗↗

A cement façade with a bellcote, crocketed pinnacles and a moulded head of Christ hides the curved hut ends so convincingly that the building looks like a proper church. Outside, a statue of St George slaying the dragon—built by Chiocchetti over a barbed-wire and concrete armature—keeps watch. Painted-glass windows of St Francis of Assisi and St Catherine of Siena flank the altar, and the whole design quietly speaks of peace: the Virgin offers the infant Jesus an olive branch, angels sheathe their swords, a dove glides across the ceiling, and she is inscribed 'Regina pacis', Queen of Peace.↗↗↗

A monument to reconciliation

The story behind the beauty is worth telling honestly. The men arrived as prisoners and objected, rightly, that building military defences broke the rules on POW labour; after Italy changed sides in 1943, those who stayed were no longer prisoners but paid workers. They left Lamb Holm in 1944, with Chiocchetti lingering to finish his masterpiece, and the camp was demolished—only the chapel and its statue survived.↗↗

What happened next gives the place its enduring power. In 1958 local Orcadians formed a Preservation Committee to save the building, and in 1960 they tracked down Chiocchetti, then living in his Dolomite village of Moena, who returned to restore his own wartime work—and came back again in later years. The towns of Orkney and Moena formally twinned in 1996, gifts from his family have enriched the interior, and the restorer Antonella Papa, who has worked in the Sistine Chapel, has spent a decade touching up its fragile frescoes. A chapel raised by foreign prisoners, tended ever since by the very community that once held them, has become one of the best-known symbols of reconciliation in Britain.↗↗↗

The island itself is still a quiet place of pasture and exposed shore, the wider landscape part of the protected naval world of Scapa Flow, with its wrecks and seabird designations. A small visitor centre and car park sit near the chapel, while the only other upstanding relic of Camp 60 remains the building itself—the rest of the camp survives only as concrete bases and ground traces in the surrounding fields.↗↗

Making the visit

The Italian Chapel is a small, consecrated and fragile interior rather than a museum to rush through; custodians manage numbers entering at once, and a short booklet (for a small donation) explains its construction in English, Italian and German. Catholic Mass is celebrated on the first Sunday of each month from April to September, so timing a visit to a service can make the experience especially moving.↗↗

Lamb Holm is an easy stop when driving the southern isles from Kirkwall—pair the chapel with the Scapa Flow story at nearby Burray and South Ronaldsay, or the Baray and barrier causeways you cross to reach the island. As with all of Orkney, weather and road conditions on the exposed barriers can change quickly, so build the visit around the chapel's set opening hours and current travel advice.↗↗