Fascism and Italy’s Fallen Soldiers
Hannah Malone
From the late 1920s on, the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers were transferred to a group of massive ossuaries. Drawing on her latest research, Hannah Malone explores the symbolisms commingled in this extraordinary act of Fascist propaganda
At Redipuglia, on a hillside close to Italy’s north-eastern border, the remains of 100,000 fallen soldiers are accommodated in an ossuary composed of terraces in the form of a giant staircase (Figure 1). Initially, Italian soldiers who died fighting in the First World War were buried in makeshift cemeteries or mass graves close to battlefields. However, after Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, those modest burial sites were held to be inappropriate for the purposes of Fascist propaganda. Thus, from 1928, the remains of 300,000 soldiers located in roughly 2650 burial places were exhumed and transferred to 36 new ossuaries. Under the surveillance of a priest, each set of remains was placed in a box, tagged and moved under military escort. The old cemeteries were then demolished while, from 1929 to 1939, the new ossuaries were erected close to the former frontlines that stretched across north-eastern Italy and into what is now Slovenia.
Figure 1 Ossuary at Redipuglia, Italy, 1938. Source: Hannah Malone, 2014.
The remains of roughly 60,000 of the fallen were placed in a crypt at Redipuglia created for those who were unknown or unidentifiable. The remains of the other 40,000 dead were slotted into the serried ranks of small individual niches that were set into the terraces ascending the hill. While Redipuglia is the largest of the ossuaries, as war cemeteries they are unique in their scale and monumentality. Their architecture embodies a typically Fascist blending of tradition and modernity, and of elements that are reminiscent of castles or fortresses. Some are classical in style and look to ancient Rome as the fountainhead appointed by the Fascist regime to signal the birth of Italy’s magnificence. However, tradition is always re-invented, for example, as evidenced by a modernist tendency towards abstraction, and the restriction of ornamentation.
Many of the ossuaries also draw symbolic capital from their associations with remote, high-altitude and war-torn landscapes. A number are located on mountains, and on high ground that was of strategic importance during the war. For instance, the ossuary on the apex of Mount Grappa is about 2000 metres above sea level, and is shaped like a ‘tower of Babel’, with terraces that ascend to a centralising tower (Figure 2). In that the site had been a battleground where the Italians fought uphill against the Austrians, the ossuary is a powerful symbol of an Italian victory. Similarly, topography is used at other ossuaries in order to exploit the symbolic values afforded by hill-top locations, views and the idea of ascension, which is built into the ossuaries at Redipuglia and Monte Grappa as a means through which visitors might mark their respect for the dead and the fatherland.
Figure 2 Ossuary at Mount Grappa, Italy, 1935. Source: Hannah Malone, 2014.
The Fascist regime went to considerable effort and expense to control the commemoration of the fallen. As the transfer of the bodies progressed, the state removed powers formerly held by the Church, and forbade mourners, veterans’ groups and local councils from building monuments to the dead. This suppressed individuality and harnessed bereavement in favour of unity under the state. Thus, whereas the fallen had previously been distributed in individual graves in smaller cemeteries, they were now gathered into homogeneous masses within significantly larger ossuaries. Meanwhile, the Fascist programme for reburial was run entirely by a military commission that responded to directions from Mussolini. That commission still exists as part of the Italian Ministry of Defence, and its archive was closed to researchers until I was allowed access in 2014. At that point, the archive was a dusty and largely disorganised collection of records, letters, photographs and drawings held in a basement under the Ministry’s headquarters in Rome. After cataloguing its contents, however, I uncovered a wealth of material that revealed insights into the political motivations that lay behind this once powerful, but secretive, body.
The ossuaries served key political aims of the Fascist dictatorship. In celebrating the fallen as heroes who gave their lives for the benefit of the nation, they helped to impose positive memories of the First World War. While Italy was on the winning side, the war was divisive. For some it was a triumphant victory, while for others it led to the pointless loss of Italian lives. Thus, in promoting a narrative based on victory, the ossuaries were meant to offset negative attitudes to the First World War, but also to prepare the Italian population for future wars. Given those aims, the ossuaries were carefully organised to carry certain meanings that they transmitted through their architecture and the uses that they accommodated. Their value to the regime was exploited through guidebooks, pamphlets, films, newspaper articles and other forms of publicity. They also became major destinations for tours that were organised by schools, universities, veterans and Fascist leisure clubs.
As a form of propaganda, they embodied both military and religious symbolism. For example, at Redipuglia, the dead are arranged in military formation. An army of the dead is fronted by the large tomb of the Duke of Aosta, a cousin of the King who led the Third Army in the First World War, and who later became a fervent Fascist. This is backed by the smaller tombs of five generals and, in turn, by the unified bodies of the fallen soldiers that are massed in the terraces on the hill. Each terrace is inscribed with the word presente, which refers to the Fascist ritual of the ‘roll call’, whereby a leader calls out the name of a fallen soldier and his comrades shout presente. The term was used to suggest that the fallen are forever present and ready to serve their country. Thus, at Redipuglia the identities of the fallen are practically annihilated, and the dead are remembered as a willing mass rather than as husbands, fathers and sons. In addition, there is no sense of the fact that, unlike the 100,000 soldiers that they appear to lead, the Duke of Aosta and his generals did not die in battle but passed away peacefully in post-war Italy.
Redipuglia can also be taken to signal how religious symbolism imbued Fascist propaganda with power borrowed from Catholicism. The fallen were described as martyrs, and their martyrdom was seen as sacrificial, or as lives lost for the redemption of the fatherland. The ossuaries were also called sacrari in recognition of their role as shrines, or places that housed ‘relics’. At Redipuglia, three crosses that stand at the top of the hill represent the ‘Calvary’ of the fallen. As with Christ, the dead have sacrificed their lives to redeem the nation, and visitors were seen as pilgrims who came to express their indebtedness to the fallen, and their faith in the cause for which they fell.
With the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1945, the ossuaries were ‘de-fascistised’, or stripped of some of the Fascist symbols, but by no means all of them. Today, they occupy an ambiguous position in Italian heritage. Although they have lost their original function as instruments of Fascist propaganda, they have been re-invented as national monuments and are still used to accommodate state and military ceremonies.
Figure 3 Staglieno Cemetery, Genoa, Italy, 1844. Source: Hannah Malone, 2012.
Hannah Malone is an architectural historian of modern Europe. After completing a PhD at Cambridge, she worked as a research fellow and lecturer at the British School at Rome, Magdalene College Cambridge, and the Freie Universität Berlin. As a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, she is now writing a book on Italy’s Fascist cemeteries. She is author of Architecture, Death and Nationhood (Routledge 2017), which examines the architecture of Italy’s 19th-century cemeteries for evidence of political and social change in a fledgling nation. In the book, cemeteries are shown to constitute an ideal subject for the architectural historian in that they mirror the cultural, socio-economic and political values of a nation and of their parent towns or cities. For example, the architecture and art of the Staglieno cemetery in the north Italian city of Genoa (Figure 3) reflects, in a purified and miniaturised form, the nature of culture, religion and politics in Italy during the struggle for nationhood in the 1800s.
Further reading
Architecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy, London and New York: Routledge, 2017. https://www.routledge.com/Architecture-Death-and-Nationhood-Monumental-Cemeteries-of-Nineteenth-Century/Malone/p/book/9781138392694
‘Fascist Italy’s Ossuaries of the Great War: Objects or Symbols?’, RIHA Journal, Special Issue ‘War Graves, 1914–1989’, 0166, 27 June 2017. http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2017/0150-0176-special-issue-war-graves/0166-malone
‘The Republican Legacy of Italy’s Fascist Ossuaries of the First World War’, Modern Italy, Special Issue ‘Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Architectural and Artistic Legacies of Fascism in Post-War and Contemporary Italy”. March 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2019.7
“Architecture, Politics and the Sacred in Military Monuments of Fascist Italy”, Modern Architecture and the Sacred, ed. Ross Anderson and Maximilian Sternberg, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/modern-architecture-and-the-sacred-9781350098718/
Links
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/person/101990
https://mpib-berlin-mpg.academia.edu/HannahMalone
