lapsed and the War ended. Despite the loss of millions of men, the Italians had done their job. They distracted the enemy and contributed to the final victory. However, as has been pointed out in previous posts, the nation was not rewarded for its efforts and the attitude of the British and the French made it clear that the Italians had not fought bravely enough. The American refusal to allow a new act of colonialism to take place laid the groundwork for the next war. When he came to power, Mussolini, like Hitler after him, was determined to honor the dead and their sacrifices. The resulting memorials fulfilled a variety of functions. First, they put a period to a long and catastrophic sentence, and second the buildings reminded the allies of the worthiness of the Italians who had actually fought very determinedly and daringly, and, of course, third, the memorials reminded the population that dying for one’s country was a noble cause. The last task of these monuments was very important. When Mussolini took over, Italy was consider to be the relaxed tourist destination it had been in the Nineteenth Century. The general European attitude was that Italian culture was in the past, linked to the Roman Empire and to the Renaissance, with the people of Italy, the Italians themselves, being extras on the sets of past glories. Mussolini had installed himself as a contemporary dictator with military and martial roots and forced Italy to become a militaristic modern state. Fascism, at its core, is fueled by the wars of the past and the wars of the future and works best when the nation under its rule is existing in a state of fear and tension, overwhelmed by feelings of danger and dread. It is the role of the dictator to both incite those fears and to promise to protect the people against those very same fears. These “wars” do not have to be military campaigns; a dictator can easily incite hatred of whatever selected “Other” is convenient. But, following the Great War, both Mussolini and then Hitler, recast themselves as authoritarian figures in carefully designed and tailored military outfits promising imminent war. Mussolini, talked about imperial glory but did very little about preparing for the abstract war to come. Hitler, on the other hand, used the coming war as a public works project, employing men as soldiers, firing up military factories, while stimulating the economy. Both Italy and Germany had lost the Great War and both needed to reclaim military honor and glory.
Il Sacrario di Redipuglia
Haunted by the memory of one of Italy’s worst defeats, Caporetto, where the Italian army counted 11,000 dead, 29,000 wounded, 300,000 prisoners and 300,000 scattered men, it was necessary to reestablish Italy as a military power. Until this massive defeat, in which the Germans finally came to the help of the Austrians, the Allies had refused to aid Itay. The Germans and Austrians lost only 50,000 men either killed or wounded and the loss of Caporetto forced the Allies to deliver aid their ally. The fact that this battle was one of twelve battles along the Isonzo River–from modern-day Slovenia to Italian territory–speaks eloquently of the futility of trench warfare. The memorials produced by Italian architects during the interwar were also practical, often being located on the actual battlefields and function as gigantic crypts. During the heat of combat there is little time to collect the dead, and, after the carnage had briefly paused, bodies were buried close to where they fell. There is scant time for nicetities and often identities are lost and many individuals remain unidentified. Famlies waiting fearfully at home never knew how their loved one died or where his body lay. Il Sacrario di Redipuglia, located in Friuli, in the Venezia Giulia area of Italy, is the nation’s official memorial to the war dead. This gigantic ascending ossuary, imagined by the architect, Giovanni Greppi (1884-1960), contained the bodies of over 100,000 Italian dead, over 60,000 of which are unknown. The role of the structure is not just to hold the remains