Dioramas
Toni Canfora’s never-ending fascination with World War Two’s Italian campaign inspires a street scene diorama, as the Allies battled their way north through the country.
When described in history books, the Allies’ Italian thrust is often obscured by other events; it also seems to be of less interest among modellers than, for instance, the Normandy campaign, or the Eastern Front.
When looking closer, however, it reveals many interesting facts, both political and military, and the magnitude of the campaign as Allied forces pushed north from their initial landings at Salerno, Calabria and Taranto is often overlooked. Its importance to the overall war effort has been hotly debated, which makes it even more intriguing as a subject. Lasting from July 1943 until the spring of 1945 – nearly two years – it can be used as a close study and textbook example of defensive fighting from the German perspective. For the Allies, it was a case study of successful amphibious landings (the biggest at that time in the war), but it was also an example of unclear objectives, poor leadership and lack of resources to reach the campaign aims.
Above: The Italian Church Ruin from Reality in Scale was engineered cleverly and detailed finely;…
