The heavily wooded hills and scrubby gullies of the Orcia Valley in the Val d’Orcia region of Tuscany must have been a hellish place to be in the worst days of the ­Second World War.

Accounts of that period tell of woods filled with all kinds of desperate people – refugees and civilians fleeing air-raid ravaged towns and villages, partisan fighters, deserters from several armies, draft dodgers and military patrols.