The Melancholy Afterlife of Italian Fascist Architecture
Funerary Architecture, Part One
If the population of a nation is alert to warning signs–and usually we are oblivious to portents–it would be well to take notice when that nation begins to build monuments to the glorious dead of the previous war. Disguised as sites of mourning, these are true monuments, not places of mourning, a memorial. For example, in American, there are simple graveyards, known as “veterans’ cemeteries,” a testament to the lack of martial spirit in the New World and to the desire to honor the dead in a simple and dignified manner. But in Italy, after the Great War, the dead soldiers who had fallen for their homeland had to be reinstalled in the national narrative as honorable warriors, not as badly led casualties of an ultimately futile war. Italy had waited cautiously, perhaps wisely, to enter the Great War. Despite the bellicosity of the Futurist artists, Italy was reluctant to fight on the same side as its ancient enemy and fellow member of the Triple Alliance, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and decided to opt instead for a part of the action that would end to their taking a nice bite out of the Empire. Through the Treaty of London in 1915, Britain offered Italy Tyrol, Dalmatia, and Istria, then parts of Austria. Italy was granted its desired control of the borders with Austro-Hungary which stretched from Trentino through the South Tyrol to Trieste. In addition, Britain promised the Albanian port city of Vlore, not to mention Albania, to be taken from the moribund Ottoman Empire. It is very easy to promise that which you cannot deliver, but, for the British, the goal was to activate a southern front and draw the Germans and the Austrians away from the northern front in France and Belgium. The ploy worked well; the Central Powers flooded in: the Austrians were determined to beat back the avaricious Italians and the Germans were anxious to protect its flank. Now all the Italian Army had to do was to win battles with its former allies. The result of accepting the tempting offer in 1915 was a national tragedy for Italy, terrible losses in one of the most completely forgotten fronts of the War, the Italian front, in the most difficult terrain of the War.
The Border between Italy and Austria
Imagine fighting trench warfare, not on a flat plain, but on a vertical incline: that was the obscure “White War.” Aside from the absorbing recent book By Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, one of the best articles on this calamity of Alpine combat appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. “An estimated 600,000 Italians and 400,000 Austrians would die on the Italian Front, many of them in a dozen battles along the Isonzo River in the far northeast. But the front zigzagged 400 miles—nearly as long as the Western Front, in France and Belgium—and much of that crossed rugged mountains, where the fighting was like none the world had ever seen or has seen since,” stated author Brian Mockenhaupt. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War, we are experiencing a global warming that is melting the ice and snow along the Italian-Austrian Alpine border and corpses have been uncovered and the entire landscape of tunnels and warfare in the mountains are now accessible. For the inhabitants of the twenty-first century, such sad remains speak of a futile conflict that brought nothing but catastrophe upon the Italians. The corpses, as described by Mochenhaupt, with blond hair and blue eyes still intact in the skull, are victims of misguided bravery for an impossible cause, but for the citizen of the previous century, a mere decade later, these unknown and buried fields of suffering were sites of unrecognized and unrewarded bravery.
For the Italians, the War could have been an opportunity to take its place as an important force in European politics, not just a backwater where history lived. Unfortunately, the heroism that was dreamed of was bogged down in the White War, where seizing the high ground was literally the name of the