[2] A few months before the Kingdom of Italy's official entry into World War I, the disastrous 1915 earthquake almost completely destroyed the city of Avezzano, razing to the ground a lot of centers in Marsica and the nearby provinces as well.

[3] Despite everything, the few young men who had survived and belonged to the age classes of the last years of the nineteenth century[4] were not exempted from military service and were called to the recruitment in the army at war and to the mobilization towards the Karst Plateau.

In order to support the reconstruction of the city, in the second half of 1916 the Salandra government decided to install Central Italy's largest concentration camp for Austro-Hungarian war prisoners.

Officially coded as PG091, the camp was located in an area north of the city, in a piece of land of about 33 hectares (82 acres), where 192 masonry and wooden pavilions were erected for prisoners' shelter and logistical services.

The burial place was closed in 1881 owing to the necessity to build, along the road to Luco dei Marsi near the Church of St Mary in Vico, a municipal cemetery which was safer from the health point of view and more suitable for the city's new needs, during a period of demographic and social growth.

While deceased officers were buried next to the St Mary in Vico cemetery, the Chiusa Resta graveyard was set up again to accommodate the corpses of the 850 Bohemian, Czech–Slovak, Croatian, Polish, Serbian, German, Hungarian internees and Romanians from Banat, Bukovina and Transilvania who had died between 1917 and 1919.