 of the soldiers but to also provide the families with a difficult closure and a site to visit–perhaps my son, husband, father, brother is buried here. Greppi worked with the sculptor Giannino Castiglione (1884-1971) to blend the memorial into the rugged landscape as if the site itself had been sculpted out and transformed into a march.
According to Gaetano Dato in his article “Chained Corpses: Warfare, Politics, and Religion After the Hapsburg Empire in the Julian March, 1930s-1970s,” this border area transitioned from a hastily chosen spot for merely collecting and burying the dead to improvised shrines in the 1920s to the final stage of erecting a substantial memorial the purpose of which was to deposit the already gathered remains. The shrine to thirty thousand nameless was established in 1923, but, when he came to power, Mussolini thought the rather homemade homage insufficiently grandiose. The Redipulglia ossuary, built on the original site of the early shrine between 1935 and 1938, was completed just before the Second World War. Going to the site is a pilgrimage to be undertaken reverently, for this is sacred ground, a final resting place. A series of terraces rise up Mont Sei Busi, a high hill overlooking the Redipuglia on the Karst Plateau. The landscape–the territory of the actual battles between the Italians and the Austrians–is not particularly inviting. Flat, marked by scrub, low bushes and twisted trees, an occasional clump of grass, dotted with a brave flower, moving in the wind, the open fields are still cut open by trenches, refuges during a war of attrition. In the spring, the site is quite green and the trees sprout leaves, leavening the bleak harshness of the plain. The hills of the plateau, Sei Busi, San Michele, Calvario, and Sabotino were killing grounds and this Italian gateway into Austria is the site of the memorials of Redipuglia and Oslavia, the Ara Pacis Mundi of Medea, as well as Colle Sant’Elia. But the memorial of Redipuglia is special in its embrace of the visitor. Even though the ossuary is on a plateau, the architect gave the structure a sense of elevation through a series of twenty-two terraces. Although the site is dotted with various and sundry tombs of the generals, such as the Duke of Aosta, the commander of the Third Army, the common soldier is celebrated with the repetition of one word, “presente.” It is as if the dead soldiers hear their names once again, stand to attention, announce their presence, and remind the visitor “we are here.”
According to Hannah Malone in her article, “Fascist Italy’s Ossuaries of the First World War: Objects or Symbols?” “That word refers to the Fascist ritual of the appello or roll call; that is, when an officer called out the name of the dead and his comrades answered presente, meaning that the dead are forever present in the memory of the living and are always ready to serve.” She continued, “However, despite the reiteration of presente, individual histories and memories are notably absent at Redipuglia. The actual identities of the fallen are practically annihilated and the dead are not remembered as husbands, fathers, and sons, but only as soldiers. The annulment of the identities of all but the very highest ranks was elitist, rather than egalitarian, as it underlined the separation of the celebrated, but largely incompetent, commanders from the mass. Their elevation was in line with a Fascist attachment to the principle of hierarchy and to the cult of the leader. Moreover, the narrative that is expressed by Redipuglia obscures the fact that, unlike the hundred thousand soldiers that made up the mass, none of the commanders died in battle, but passed away peacefully in post-war Italy.”
Greppi used the Italian system of perspective in building his receding ascending staircases, presenting the pilgrim with a journey, a series of stations leading to three plain and stark crosses. The staircase or series of terraces act like the horizontal grids of a perspective drawing, drawing the visitor towards a horizon line. As one walks, the horizon line slip