horitarian 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 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