The Black Feathers wrote epic pages on the eastern Italian border, including Mario Maffi's explorations in the foibe.

The Alpine troops were established in 1872 to guard border crossings and valleys with local recruitment, an innovative approach for the Royal Army. In fact, taking as a model the Tyrolean Landesschützen and the Risorgimento precedents of the Cadorini Volunteers, capable of giving the Habsburgs a hard time in 1848 under the leadership of Calvi, and Garibaldi's Alpine Hunters, the General Staff understood that a possible theatre of war such as the Alpine one required perfect knowledge of the territory. Furthermore, the valley dwellers, being mobilised to defend their homes, would have guaranteed a greater defensive capacity, encouraged by the awareness of fighting directly for the safety of their loved ones. In this way, the conscript classes drawn from the Slovenian communities of the Natisone valleys, annexed in 1866 and the first example of a linguistic minority within the Savoy State, were also classified with the traditional black pen. At the same time, the irredentist youth of Trieste, through the Alpine Society of the Julian Alps, had promoted hiking and mountaineering with the aim of training and learning about what would be the battlefield of the long-awaited new war of redemption, with the hope of starting a gang war in the rear of the Habsburg mountains (following a Mazzinian model) or of exfiltrating to don the grey-green uniform and provide valuable logistical support (similarly to what Cesare Battisti of Trentino would have done).

During the Great War, dozens of battalions from Adamello to Carso, passing through Ortigara, fought very often, confronting Austrian Schützen who until a few months earlier had been their friends and acquaintances in the context of cross-border communications between one valley and another. In the first days of conflict on the Julian Alps front, the Alpine troops achieved one of the most strategically significant feats: the conquest of Monte Nero, which allowed Cadorna's troops to look out over the fatal Caporetto basin. At the end of the war, a couple of companies of the Morbegno battalion, destined to guard Fiume occupied by d'Annunzio, deserted and, together with individual comrades and a unit of machine gunners already present in the capital of the Kvarner region, formed the Battaglione Alpini Legionari Fiumani.

During the Second World War, the Taurinense, Pusteria and Alpi Graie divisions experienced the harshness of the anti-partisan struggle in Montenegro, Sandzak and Herzegovina (1941-1943), where the Julia, severely tested on the Greek-Albanian front and even more so on the Russian one, would experience the catastrophic events of 8 September in Friuli Venezia Giulia, where it was in the process of reorganisation. Although reduced to the bare minimum, the Julia managed to face the German columns arriving from Austria before being disbanded and going to clandestinely form the backbone of the “white” Osoppo partisan brigade, whose leaders, opposed to Tito's expansionist project in the north-east of Italy, would be eliminated by Friulian Gappisti of communist faith at the Malghe di Porzûs in February 1945. In defense of the Italian nature of these lands there were also black feathers under the flag of the Italian Social Republic: the Tagliamento regiment, the Valanga battalion within the Decima Division and the Julia company with coastal defense duties in Fiume.

And it is precisely to an Alpine soldier who recently passed away, Mario Maffi, that we owe the first reconnaissances in search of human remains at the bottom of the foibe in the post-war period, following the discoveries made by Marshal of the Pola Fire Brigade Arnaldo Harzarich in Istria in the autumn of 1943 and by the Anglo-Americans on the Trieste Karst in the summer of 1945. An expert speleologist, Maffi carried out dramatic undercover night-time reconnaissances in the depths of Basovizza and Monrupino, but also beyond the border, thanks to an armed escort: his testimony (later reworked in “1957. An Alpine soldier discovering the foibe”, Gaspari, Udine 2013) and his photos demonstrated that there were still bones and remains resulting from the mass massacres perpetrated by Tito's troops during the terrible Forty Days of Domination in the Venezia Giulia. A few days after his death, the Slovenian State Commission for Mass Graves declared that on Slovenian territory there are approximately 600 sites where victims of Tito's repression still lie: in these collective graves there are the bodies of former Slovenian and Croatian collaborators, but probably also of hundreds of deported Italians.

Committee February 10, July 13, 2017