The largest military shrine in Italy preserves 100.000 fallen soldiers from the First World War, of whom 60.000 are unknown. On the centenary of what, especially but not only for the Italians of the eastern border was a true Fourth War of Independence, it has received a large restoration that has finally come to an end.

This is the monumental staircase of Redipuglia (Italianization of the Slovenian toponym Sredipolje). It was inaugurated in 1938 based on a project by the architect Giovanni Greppi and the sculptor Giannino Castiglioni. This partnership had also been entrusted with the Bezzecca Military Shrine (which united Garibaldi's fallen soldiers from the Third War of Independence and soldiers from the First World War, seen by many as the fourth stage of the Risorgimento), that of Bligny in France (for the fallen of the Expeditionary Corps on the Marne), as well as the sites of Caporetto, San Candido, Colle Isarco and Monte Grappa. In the case of Redipuglia, their architectural work climbs the 90 meters of altitude of Monte Sei Busi, the site of terrifying clashes during the first, second and fourth Battle of the Isonzo: at the summit stand three crosses, like at the top of Golgotha, the hill where Christ's sacrifice took place.

Here instead lie the remains of the fallen of the Third Army, the names of forty thousand of whom are inscribed in alphabetical order in the bronze of the plaques that cover the 22 steps of the colossal staircase, on whose first step we find among others the name of the Red Cross nurse Margherita Kaiser Parodi Orlando, the only woman buried here, and at the top of which lie the remains of approximately sixty thousand unknown soldiers. A terrifying figure, which can help us understand how the potential of the weapons in use (machine guns, hand grenades, grenades, poison gas) could devastate and disfigure the bodies of the soldiers (often left to decompose in no man's land at the end of unfortunate assaults or used to reinforce the trenches), to the point of making them unrecognizable. However, these one hundred thousand fallen, dead in a restricted territory and to conquer or reconquer from time to time a few meters, are regimented, well deployed, in an absolutely anonymous and egalitarian manner following their highest ranking officers.

At the base of the imposing construction, in fact, six enormous urns stand out from the mass of the fallen, in which rest as many generals who died in battle. Even further ahead, leader of this group, stands the monolith in red marble from Valcamonica weighing 75 tons in which Duke Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy-Aosta, commander of the undefeated Army, asked and obtained to be buried in 1931, and even further ahead stretches the Via Eroica, made up of 38 bronze tombstones fixed to the ground and bearing the names of the most sadly known battle sites in the area.

This army was defined as "undefeated" because it was forced to retreat only after Caporetto, a defeat of the Italian forces which however occurred in the sector of the front under the jurisdiction of the Second Army, while the thrusts of the Third had led to the conquest of the Bainsizza plateau and, ever more threateningly, to the assault on the entrenched complex of Ermada, putting at risk the enemy's defensive system, which would in fact have been strengthened by German contingents.

And the cemetery of the undefeated was the name of the first collective burial site set up after the war on the Sant'Elia hill, which stands right in front of the Redipuglia complex. It was inaugurated by the soldier king Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy on 24 May 1923, whereas on 19 September 1938 it was the former rifleman Benito Mussolini who inaugurated the Redipuglia monument: over the course of fifteen years the regime had dominated the memory of the Great War and its celebrations. The same word "PRESENT" carved repeatedly on the gigantic steps (2 and a half metres high and 12 metres wide) recalls the ritual of the ceremonies in which the black shirts commemorated those who fell for the fascist revolution. The nearby little station was meant to facilitate the influx of "pilgrims" visiting this shrine to the religion of the Fatherland: veterans and their relatives, relatives of the fallen, the disabled and new generations were the visitors who already assiduously frequented the places where what contemporaries had called the Great War took place.

Today the Colle del Sant'Elia is a sort of Remembrance Park, in the shade of whose cypresses we can only imagine the original layout, designed by Colonel Vincenzo Paladini who, referring to Dante's Purgatory, developed seven concentric sectors that culminated in a votive chapel, today replaced by a Roman column from the nearby excavations of Aquileia, the place from which the journey of the railway hearse of the Unknown Soldier began. The tombs (later transferred in their entirety to the structure opposite) were decorated with relics collected on the battlefield and poetic epigraphs, today present in copies of the originals, ruined by the action of atmospheric agents already in the years immediately following the inauguration.

Lorenzo Salimbeni

 

The small – 14/08/2021