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War Exposition Gustav Line Cassino 44: battlefield finds in the heart of the town
In the Historial Museum of Cassino, in Via San Marco, four rooms house the War Exposition Gustav Line Cassino 44, a collection of original artefacts gathered from the battlefields of the Gustav Line. The exhibition is curated by the association of the same name, and was inaugurated in 2022, eighty years after the fighting that, between January and May 1944, devastated the Cassino area and led to the destruction of Montecassino Abbey.
What to see
The route takes visitors into four distinct spaces. Two rooms are dedicated to the Allied forces — the American Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army — with uniforms, weapons, equipment and personal belongings of the soldiers. A third room gathers material from the Wehrmacht, while the last room reconstructs a German bunker, with period furnishings and instrumentation. Almost all the items on display come directly from the Cassino front: helmets, mess tins, ammunition and an MG42 machine gun in excellent condition.
A museum within a museum
The War Exposition forms part of the Historiale’s multimedia itinerary, conceived by two-time Academy Award winner Carlo Rambaldi. Visitors can thus move from the immersive reconstructions of the battle - with footage, recorded voices and scale models of the defensive lines - to the actual artefacts of those who fought that war.
