‘Public ceremonies, private mourning: the First World War in Roman memory’

Public Ceremonies, Private Mourning: The First World War in Roman Memory

Vanda Wilcox, “Public Ceremonies, Private Mourning: The First World War in Roman Memory” in

K. Hall and K. Jones, Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Literature and

Culture. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)

The First World War represented the painful birth-pangs of a new order: from the struggle and

sacrifice of 1915-1918 arose a new Italy, new Italians, a new society and a new culture. Thus argued

the Fascist Party, at least. The idea that fascism was the natural product of the Great War was an

intrinsic part of fascist political culture: the war was therefore to be discussed, studied, described,

commemorated and celebrated in ways that reflected its status as the progenitor of the party.1 As the

fascist era progressed, the myth of the war came increasingly under centralised control as the regime's

cultural policy became more clearly articulated and the state promoted a homogeneous presentation

of the war in line with the party’s own interpretation. In this narrative of willing sacrifice and

triumphant rebirth, the weakness of the Liberal state was purged and old-fashioned moral decline was

replaced by patriotic fervour which generated national strength.2 Key concepts for the presentation

of the war were glory, heroism, self-sacrifice, national greatness and an incitement to others to follow

the example of the fallen; mourning, grief and regret had little part to play. In fact a more triumphalist

vision of patriotic sacrifice began immediately upon victory, even before the fascist seizure of power.

Monuments and memorials, public ceremonies and publications of all kinds were designed to

celebrate Italy's triumph.3

However, memory was not a post-war phenomenon: formal and informal means of remembrance

began as soon as the first casualties were recorded, before the knowledge of ultimate victory could

be used to shape their message. A comparison of wartime and post-war commemoration shows both

considerable continuity and significant changes at work. After the war, commemoration was

organised across Italy by town and city councils and subsequently by local Fascist Party functionaries,

while national projects were carried out at resonant sites on former battlefields and in Rome. Their

location in the capital city served to increase the significance of such national monuments, just as the

1 Emilio Gentile, Il Culto del littorio: La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza,

1993), pp. 27-41. 2 On redemptive sacrifice and national resurrection, see my article ‘From Heroic Defeat to Mutilated Victory: The

Myth of Caporetto in Fascist Italy’, in Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era, ed.

by Jenny Macleod (London: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 46-61. 3 Francesco Bartolini, ‘Gloria e rimpianto: L’evoluzione delle epigrafie’, in La Memoria Perduta: I monumenti ai

caduti della Grande Guerra a Roma e nel Lazio, ed. by Vittorio Vidotto, Bruno Tobia and Catherine Brice (Rome:

Àrgos, 1998), pp. 53-63.

Public Ceremonies, Private Mourning

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monuments themselves, and their ‘sacred’ meaning, bolstered the relatively recent status of Rome as

a national capital. By virtue of the city’s special status, Romans were presented not only with the

locally selected and constructed symbols of the war which all Italians encountered, but also with

numerous national memorial projects. Nowhere was the state-sanctioned view of the war presented

more comprehensively or more frequently, both during and after the conflict. After the March on

Rome in 1922, exponents of the new regime sought urgently to transform the city into the capital of

their imaginings, rather than the recalcitrant and unglamorous reality they discovered: Rome was ‘una

città nemica da conquistare’ [an enemy city to be conquered], in part through a programme of

monument-building.4 Rome occupied a unique place in the fascist vision of Italy and an idealised

romanità or Romanness was celebrated as an integral part of fascist identity and ideology.5 Yet

citizens found ways to present their own forms of commemoration, which might follow or diverge

from the official narrative. Moreover, the war was only the most recent of the many historical

memories woven into the urban fabric of the capital; it had to compete with an abundance of sources

of meaning and identity, ranging from the classical era to the Renaissance, the glories of the Papal

city to the Italian victory at Porta Pia in 1870.6 Despite the totalising imperative of fascist memory,

the people of Rome retained physical and imaginative spaces in which to express their own visions

of the war.7

The Impact of the First World War on Rome

It is hard to be certain of the precise human cost of the war in Rome. It is estimated that some 65,000

men were called up, whether to serve at the front or in war industries, accounting for roughly one in

ten of the population.8 Casualty figures are as imprecise as they are everywhere in Italy, not least

because the city boundaries and the military districts did not coincide. The national war roll, compiled

in 1929 for the purposes of pension allocation, records 7891 war dead from the military district.9 The

city council’s own war roll, compiled in 1920, claimed around 4200 Roman dead along with a further

2500 casualties from other parts of Italy who had died in the capital’s hospitals during the conflict.10

4 Alfredo Signoretti, Come diventai fascista, (Rome, 1967) p. 118, cited in Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di Pietro

(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007) pp. 6-7. 5 Borden W. Painter, Mussolini's Rome. Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) pp. 1-

7; Vittorio Vidotto, Roma Contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006), pp. 178-85 6 Mario Manieri Elia, ‘Roma capitale: strategie urbane e uso delle memorie’, in Il Lazio, ed. by Alberto Caracciolo

(Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1991), pp. 513-19. 7 On the diversity of Italian memories of the war, see John Foot, Fratture d’Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009) pp. 53-69 8 Alessandra Staderini, Combattenti senza divisa: Roma durante la Grande Guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995) pp.

80-1. 9 Ministero della Guerra, Militari Caduti nella Guerra Nazionale 1915-1918: Albo d’oro, 28 vols (Rome, 1929), I. 10 Comune di Roma, Albo d’oro dei cittadini caduti nella Guerra MCMXV-MCMXVIII (Rome, 1920) vol. I, Elenco

riassuntivo.


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A third possibility of 5160 is derived from the ossuary in the Verano cemetery. By 1924, pensions

were being issued to 1380 bereaved mothers, 1200 war widows and 2000 war orphans.11

Whatever their precise number, the loss of these Roman men was one which marked the city,

physically and emotionally, during and after the war. Geographically distant from the front and only

rarely granted the comfort of a body to bury or even the location of a known grave, families in capital

cities had to find new ways to mourn, modifying traditional funereal rites and practices accordingly.12

During the war, commemoration was dominated by mourning, through family-led ceremonies and

collective occasions. Almost immediately afterwards a process of institutionalisation began, as

parishes, localities and organisations began to erect their own monuments. Rome is divided into

neighbourhoods called rioni (within the Aurelian walls) and quartieri (outside them), which began to

erect monuments and to campaign for roads to be renamed from 1919 onwards. Some of the earliest

moves towards collective commemoration came from institutions in the public administration: most

ministries erected monuments to their fallen employees in 1919 and 1920.13 Schools, universities,

orphanages, workplaces and workers’ organisations autonomously decided to honour their dead

collectively, and institutions derived social credit from the sacrifice made by their members or ex-

members.14 This kind of social agency played a vital role in shaping memorial practices in the city.15

But the fallen were also remembered individually: families organised formal remembrance of their

loved ones, while local and national authorities acted to commemorate individuals of particular

renown. The intersection between public and private memory and between state-sanctioned and

independent forms could be a complex matter, leading to a richly textured and heterogeneous memory

of the First World War in Rome.

The Verano Cemetery

Rome’s established site of mourning was the Verano cemetery, a monumental complex dating back

to the classical era, redesigned in the Napoleonic period by Valadier and re-consecrated in 1835. By

1900 it was the only authorised burial site in the city, other than the well-known Protestant cemetery,

and despite bomb damage in 1943 it remains the city’s chief burial place to this day and a powerful

11 Staderini, p. 81. A further c.4000 (or more) Roman citizens died in the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918. 12 Carine Trevisan and Elise Julien, ‘Cemeteries’ in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919;

Volume 2: A cultural history ed. by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),

pp. 428-67 (pp. 428-9). 13 Vidotto, Roma Contemporanea, pp. 158-9. 14

Staderini, p. 427. Examples include the Banca d’Italia monument in Palazzo Koch or the monument in the

courtyard of the Pio Ospedale del Santo Spirito. 15 Jay Winter’s concept of ‘fictive kinship’ is useful here: see Jay Winter, Remembering War. The Great War

Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 135-53


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local symbol.16 This tree-filled, landscaped site incorporates Jewish and Muslim enclosures, family

and individual tombs and the collective sites of Catholic lay brotherhoods. Romans of all classes

turned to the Verano Cemetery as the site for the expression of their grief and loss during the First

World War, though interring someone there was an expensive business. Burial plots started at 350

lire in 1915, which represented over one third of the annual take-home pay of a manual labourer, and

well over half the annual pay and allowances of a married conscript soldier with two children.17 To

this had to be added the expenses of the tomb itself; marble slabs and monumental masonry increased

sharply in cost immediately upon the outbreak of the war.18 Many families opted for a less costly

cremation, followed by the erection of a plaque or depositary for ashes instead.

As early as October 1915, when 230 Romans had already fallen, the council began to discuss the

possibility of repatriating all Roman war dead into a single ossuary within the cemetery.19 It was to

prove practically impossible to repatriate all the bodies, but the project was given final approval in

1921 and the monument, effectively a cenotaph rather than an ossuary, was finally inaugurated in

1931, after the design was modified by local fascists.20 Although the ‘Ossuario’ was in fact not a

place of burial, the city council agreed that the cemetery was the most appropriate location for the

city’s chief monument.21 Listing the names of all the war-dead of Rome, it sought to reunite the city’s

fallen servicemen as well as claiming a kind of authority for their commemoration, a role usually

reserved for families.

However the continuance of family tradition through individual burial or commemoration in the

Verano was important for many Romans. When young lawyer and artilleryman Lieutenant Alberto

Rossi was killed near Gorizia in 1917, his family – from their prestigious address on Via Quirinale,

by the Royal Palace – sent an announcement to the national dailies, declaring themselves proud of

the ‘bloody sacrifice’ he had made for the sake of ‘a greater Italy’ [una più grande Italia]. Confident

of victory, they looked forward to returning his body from its current resting place to the family tomb

in the Verano, where it would be reunited with both his family and his fellow Romans.22 At a rather

humbler level, when thirty-eight-year old native Roman Sergeant Guido Mallucci of the Territorial

16 Luisa Cardilli and Nicoletta Cardano, eds, Percorsi nella Memoria: Il Quadriportico del Verano (Rome: Fratelli

Palombi, 1998), pp. 12-16. 17 Average daily wages in Rome in 1914 were 3.71 lira, rising to 3.83L by 1917. Staderini, p. 82. Conscripts were

paid 0.5L daily, plus family allowances: 0.7L for wives and 0.35L per child under twelve in Rome; smaller sums were

paid outside the big cities. Il Messaggero, 23 May 1917 and 25 October 1917. 18 Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Roma, [hereafter ACC] (1915) Quadr. I, p. 38. 19 ACC, (1915) Quadr III, pp. 5-10; Staderini, p. 79. 20 Manuela Riosa, ‘Comitati locali e potere politico: i caratteri della committenza’ in La Memoria Perduta, pp. 11–

27 (pp. 12-13). 21 Repatriation was never officially instituted in Italy, and hence was rare. Compare the French case: Jay Winter,

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1995), pp. 22-28. 22 Il Corriere della Sera, 7 November 1917.


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Militia realised that he was dying in the military hospital of Civitavecchia, he instructed his family to

take him home after his death. His modest tomb records this final wish: ‘I fratelli e le sorelle /

doloranti / esaudirano il desiderio del amato defunto / dandogli sepoltura nel camposanto di Roma’

[His brothers and sisters / in sadness / carried out the desire of their loved late [relative] / giving him

a burial in the cemetery of Rome].23

A number of the funereal inscriptions mention Rome itself. Pietro Rastellini (1894-1917) died

on the ‘arid’ Carso ‘fiero nella severa educazione romana’ [proud of his strict Roman education],

according to the inscription on his family tomb. An imposing memorial in the oldest, most prestigious

quadrangle on the site, alongside an elaborate family tomb, records: ‘Alla memoria di Giuseppe

Brunetti / Romano’ [To the memory of Giuseppe Brunetti, Roman] before it even lists his rank or

date of death. Even more notable is the nearby monument to twenty-three-year old lawyer Gino di

Castro, a machine-gun lieutenant in the 5th Bersaglieri Regiment. Though buried in the ‘invitti’

[unconquered] Alps where he fell in November 1917, ‘Questo Cenotafio / Rievochi alle generazioni

venture / La sacra memoria dell’eroe / Che ad Asiago / Offri Romanamente alla Patria / La sua balda

giovinezza’ [This Cenotaph / will remind future generations / of the Sacred memory of this hero /

who at Asiago / offered to the Nation in Roman style/ his bold youth]. These are perhaps not a sign

of local identity per se but rather of locally mediated patriotism: such evocations of Roman identity

suggest a clear link to the martial grandeur of Imperial Rome as well as the importance of Rome in

the imagery of the Risorgimento (the process of Italian unification).24 This supports Romke Visser's

argument that ‘the cult of romanità was traditionally part of a generally coherent set of ideas which

formed the political position of educated right-wing Italians well before the [Fascist] revolution.’25

But the subsequent mobilisation of classical iconography by Mussolini suggests that the idea had

resonance beyond this wealthy and educated group. Indeed the term ‘romanamente’ features in

fascist-built war memorials in the new working-class suburbs of Portuense (memorial erected in

1923) and Quadraro (1925). This was an expression of patriotism through a loyalty both older and

more immediate than that of the modern nation: the glories of Rome preceded those of Italy both

chronologically and imaginatively.

The tombstone inscriptions of officers and those in the wealthiest parts of the Verano cemetery

frequently reference the nation, with stock phrases like ‘per la patria’ [for the fatherland]. Patriotic

and martial imagery seems less common among less wealthy Romans, though by no means wholly

absent. The very modest resting place of Luca Cestari, a private in the 3rd Field Artillery, records his

23 Unless otherwise specified, all translations are by the author, and all inscriptions and dates have been recorded by

the author in person. 24 Gentile, Fascismo di Pietra, pp. 35-40. 25 Romker Visser, ‘Fascist Doctrine and the Romanità’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27:1 (1992), 5–22, p. 7.


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death from wounds in the Trentino on 28 October 1916. The conventional inscription ‘per la patria’

explains his death and the cast bronze plaque is topped with the stylised form of a soldier tending a

cannon. Yet patriotism, even victory, could not always console. When Corporal Major Enrico Nicolai

died in hospital in December 1918, the recent victory proved to be of little comfort to his family. On

the contrary, the inscription they placed on his tomb makes no reference to either Christian or patriotic

redemption: ‘Fatalmente morto al cessar della Guerra / 6 dicembre 1918 / ospedaletto di campo 123P-

- / la figlia la moglie ed i parenti / sconsolati ne perpetuano la memoria’ [unluckily dying at the close

of the war / 6 December 1918 / in Field Hospital 123P-- / his daughter, wife and family / unconsoled,

preserve his memory forever]. Nicolai’s image is painted onto porcelain alongside similar portraits

of cousins and parents on the family tomb, a depositary for ashes in one of the less costly areas of the

cemetery.

If patriotic victory was not always sufficient, nor was official commemoration: the official

monument to the war disabled, a simple arch with a cross mounted on it located near the Ossuary, is

a concrete example of the interaction between public and private memories. On the base of the arch

and the surrounding paved area, dozens of small personal memorials have been placed by families of

the deceased war wounded: flowers, images, urns, stone carvings and inscriptions. This suggests both

acceptance of the officially sanctioned ‘site’ of this particular memory, and a simultaneous desire to

express individuality and heterogeneity within its framework. These interactions suggest that

collective commemoration alone was insufficient for the bereaved.

The significance of the Verano is that the messages conveyed there were ‘private’ yet were

displayed publicly; though visible and accessible to all they remained highly personal to the families

who had erected each monument, and thus display the diversity and range of individual reflections

on grief and commemoration.

Public Ceremonies and the Vittoriano

The Verano was a site not just for burial but for ceremonies. Each year on 2 November, the Catholic

festival of All Souls, families visit the cemetery to remember their loved ones, bringing wreaths and

candles. During the war this was elevated into an occasion for patriotic solemnity as well as private

mourning.26 Pilgrimages to the Verano were held not only on days of religious significance but of

patriotic importance, prefiguring what Emilio Gentile has termed the ‘sacralization of politics’ which

took place under Mussolini.27 On the first anniversary of the Italian capture of Gorizia, thanksgiving

26 Patriotic rituals on 2 November were also established in Paris: Trevisan and Julien, pp. 446-7. 27 Gentile, Il culto del Littorio, pp. 269-74 .


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celebrations were held in the cemetery. The city council and various patriotic associations sent

wreaths and gave speeches, but private individuals also sent flowers and crowds gathered to listen.28

If the Verano was Rome’s site of mourning, her ‘site of memory’ was a relative newcomer: the

Vittorio Emanuele monument, commonly known as the Vittoriano, located in the heart of the historic

centre, visually dominating Piazza Venezia. Inaugurated in 1911 while still incomplete, this marble

monstrosity was dedicated to the memory of Vittorio Emanuele II, the king who unified Italy, and

was created to act as a focal point for national pride. It includes multiple allegorical references to the

artistic and military glories of Italy’s past as well as the sacralised site of the ‘Altare della Patria’

[Altar of the Nation] at the centre of the monument itself.29 The Vittoriano also served as the Roman

site of public ceremonies par excellence during the war. Processions to or from the monument along

the main streets of Rome were held to celebrate religious festivals, national holidays, important

anniversaries and sometimes for no very clear reason.30 Smartly turned-out troops, patriotic

associations with embroidered banners, marching bands, public speakers, politicians, children with

flags and women with flowers paraded around the city with such frequency that it appears not a month

went by without at least one such occasion. Whether organised by the city council, the mayor’s office

or by one of the numerous patriotic bodies, members of the public were reported to turn out in their

thousands to line the streets, to listen to speeches, to sing patriotic hymns or to shout ‘Evviva Italia!’

[Long live Italy!]

Like the Verano, the Vittoriano also offered the potential for uniting patriotic remembrance with

public grief. On 2 November each year during the war a huge funeral cortège, adorned with banners

and symbols of mourning, wound its way through the city to deposit wreaths and flowers on the steps

of the monument. Heavily promoted by local and national newspapers in the days leading up to the

event, the ceremony would last for much of the day as groups and individuals filed past to lay floral

offerings.31 On 2 November 1917, mid-way through the battle of Caporetto, the numbers attending

were unprecedented: many families were waiting for news from the front, and in the absence of any

more concrete activity chose to channel their fears through the public mourning and patriotic

solemnity of the Vittoriano ceremony, a grave occasion in keeping with the national mood.32 In

parallel with the staging of patriotic festivities in the cemetery, this occasion marked a fascinating

28 Il Corriere della Sera, 13 August 1917. 29 David Atkinson and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the

Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870-1945’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88:1 (1998),

28–49; Bruno Tobia, L’Altare della Patria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998). 30 E.g. Il Corriere della Sera, 23 July and 10 September 1917, 04 January 1918 31 See Il Messaggero and Il Corriere della Sera 2-5 November, 1915-17. 32 Il Messaggero, 3-4 November 1917. See also Staderini, p .426.


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confluence of Catholic ritual with the invented tradition of civil religion, as this holy day was

celebrated at a patriotic, national site.

After the war, public ceremonies at the site began to change, growing more triumphal in character

and less contemplative. The mourning events of 2 November were easily subsumed and over-written

by the festivities of 4 November, the day of the Italian armistice. Meanwhile the national – and

nationalist – role of the site was emphasised at the expense of the local, well before the fascist seizure

of power.33 A formidable display of captured Austrian artillery was installed in Piazza Venezia for

most of 1919. Situated right outside the former Austro-Hungarian Embassy and directly opposite the

Vittoriano monument, this was a tangible sign of national victory.34 In November 1921, following

the models of London and Paris, Rome inaugurated a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.35 The tomb and

an eternal flame were placed at the heart of the monument, beneath a statue of the goddess Roma

(which at that time was still made of papier-maché).36 The inauguration of the Tomb of the Unknown

Soldier set the precedent for a fully national, state-directed occasion.37 Yet despite this, at least thirty-

four local memorials were erected in the city in the twelve months that followed. This suggests that

the Tomb did not obviate the commemorative need felt by many Romans: the Vittoriano was a

national site of memory rather than a local one, which if anything may have stimulated the desire for

separate local monuments. This tendency was further enhanced after 1922 as Mussolini placed the

Vittoriano at the heart of many of his celebratory national rites, making it a site for officially-

sanctioned memory rather than personal pilgrimage.38 But beyond the Verano and the Vittoriano, new

locations for memory began to spring up all over the city even while the war was going on, as war

memorials were erected and roads were renamed.

Commemorative Toponymy: Street Names and the First World War

The idea that urban toponymy was an appropriate site for the expression of patriotic identity was well

established by the outbreak of war: shortly after unification many cities began to rename streets and

piazzas whose designations had links to old regimes or the Papacy, endowing them with names

evocative of the Risorgimento such as Cavour, Garibaldi or Mazzini.39 However, this practice was

locally directed and hence haphazard, and no effort was made to supervise the process of naming

33 Vidotto, Roma Contemporanea, pp.168-71. 34 Gentile, Fascismo di Pietra, pp. 43-5. 35 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1991), pp. 93-97 (though the date of inauguration is given incorrectly as 1920). 36 Gentile, Fascismo di Pietra, p. 21. 37 The selection and interment of the ‘milite ignoto’ [unknown soldier] was wreathed in layers of ritual meaning.

See e.g. La Domenica del Corriere, 6-13 November 1921. 38 Painter, pp. 33-6 39 Sergio Raffaelli, ‘I nomi delle vie’, in I Luoghi della Memoria: Simboli e Miti dell’Italia Unita, ed. by Mario

Isnenghi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), pp. 215-42 (pp. 218-20).


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streets at a national level until 1923. From 1916, towns and cities across Italy independently began to

introduce war-related street names in honour of the irredentist objectives of Trento and Trieste, or

Gorizia after the capture of that town in August 1916.

Beginning in 1923, the Fascist party legislated to centralise and standardise the system,

abrogating the responsibility for toponymic decisions to provincial and national government in order

to protect the nation’s cultural heritage. No individual who had died within the previous decade could

be honoured with a street name except members of the royal family and those ‘fallen in war or in the

national cause’.40 The latter was an explicit reference to the so-called ‘fascist martyrs’ of 1919-22

and posited a direct equivalence between those who died in the conflict of 1915-18 and those killed

advancing the cause of fascist revolution.

By this time Rome had already embarked on a ‘renaming spree’. Roads, piazzas and bridges

were named for generals, politicians and martyrs of the war, for crucial rivers, mountains, towns and

cities which had been defended or captured, for the dates of the declaration of war and the armistice.

This programme commenced while the war was still in progress: at Piazza Venezia, the central focus

of the secular national capital, a highly significant memorial message was evoked.41 On 20 September

1916 (itself a resonant patriotic and Roman anniversary) a plaque was unveiled opposite the

Vittoriano in honour of leading irredentist Cesare Battisti, a national hero and patriotic martyr after

his execution by the Austrians on 12 July 1916. The inscription, by the writer and parliamentary

deputy Ferdinando Martini, reads: ‘La disperata Austriaca ferocia / volle offesi e puniti / in CESARE

BATTISTI / la stirpe e la fede / L’amore della patria e della libertà / e nella cieca barbarie del supplizio

/ se condannò all’obbrobrio del mondo / lui votando all’ammirazione dei secoli’ [The pointless

savagery of the Austrians / sought to punish and humiliate / in Cesare Battisti / ancestry and faith /

love for the fatherland and for freedom / and through the blind barbarism of torture / condemned itself

to the world's opprobrium / while raising him to the admiration of the centuries to come].

Simultaneously, the street where the plaque was located, leading eastwards from Piazza Venezia and

forming one of the city’s main traffic arteries, was renamed in his honour. Patriotic self-sacrifice was

thus symbolically located in the very heart of Rome. Once the war had ended, an even more

significant toponymic image was created. Via Cesare Battisti leads up the beginning of the Viminal

hill directly into Via Quattro Novembre, celebrating the Armistice of 1918. Symbolically, climbing

the slope of martyrdom led directly and inexorably to military victory. At the other end Via Quattro

Novembre leads directly into Via Nazionale, so named in 1870, thus physically connecting military

40 Raffaelli, pp. 227-9. This law remains in force and has recently been invoked to prevent the renaming of a piazza

in honour of G8 protestor Carlo Giuliani, killed in 2001. See also the chapter by Monica Jansen and Inge Lanslots in

this volume. 41 The new state emphasised the axes of Piazza Venezia / the Corso and via Nazionale / Termini station in an effort

to reshape the city away from its Papal past, highlighting continuity with the classical period. Manieri Elia, pp. 519-23.


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victory to the nation. To the left, Via Ventiquattro Maggio was renamed in 1917 to celebrate the date

of Italian intervention in the war.42 Meanwhile on the first anniversary of the armistice, 4 November

1919, Via Veneto was formally renamed Via Vittorio Veneto, in honour of Italian victory there which

concluded the war.43

The significance that the general public attached to the names of streets can perhaps best be

gauged by the reactions at the end of the fascist period and subsequent Nazi occupation: many streets

that had been renamed during the fascist era were renamed yet again immediately after the fall of the

regime (often to honour murdered socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti), so that for months a toponymic

chaos reigned. On 2 February 1945 the city council in Rome officially approved the removal of fifty-

nine fascistic street names and replaced them with the names of anti-fascist politicians and martyrs,

and of heroes of the Resistance.44 The failure of the fascist regime to establish the equivalence of the

fallen of the First World War and those of the fascist Revolution in the popular mentality is shown in

the fact that these anti-fascist naming committees were quite happy to retain nearly all names

associated with the First World War.

Wartime Monuments

The process of erecting memorials began while the war was still in progress as a means to inspire

greater loyalty to the cause; unlike the public ceremonies enacted in the city, these war-time

memorials rarely emphasised mourning. A bust of Cesare Battisti was erected in 1917, with an

unveiling ceremony on 22 July providing an opportunity for a patriotic procession and speeches from

politicians. It was placed in the Pincio park in the grounds of the Villa Borghese, and was joined in

February 1918 by that of fellow irredentist martyr Guglielmo Oberdan. Not everyone approved of

these installations: only three days after Oberdan’s bust had been unveiled, a thirty-year-old Roman

mechanic named Angelo Podo attacked it with a hammer, damaging the statue severely. Declining to

explain his actions, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a hefty fine, while the bust had to

be resculpted.45

Monuments to the fallen were unusual while the war was ongoing and were chiefly erected in

educational establishments, where their purpose, often quite explicitly, was to inspire other young

men in turn. In May 1916 the patriotically named ‘XX settembre’ boys’ school in the Nomentana

quarter erected a memorial to seven former pupils who had died in the first year of the war. The five

soldiers, one sergeant and one second lieutenant were honoured with a bronze wreath donated by the

42 Il Corriere della Sera. 3 August 1917. 43 Vidotto, Roma Contemporanea, p. 169. 44 Raffaelli, pp. 234-40. 45 Il Corriere della Sera, 19 February 1918.


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neighbouring girls’ school, and their pictures were placed in the entrance hall to act as an inspirational

example to current pupils.46 Meanwhile, when the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci on Via Cavour

erected a plaque in 1917 (on the initiative of its pupils) to commemorate its fallen students, space was

confidently left for further names to be added as necessary.47 Though few monuments were erected

in wartime outside school settings this did not indicate a lack of commemorative activity: ceremonies

of varying degrees of formality were held to mark the deaths of friends and acquaintances, most

commonly in the former workplace of the deceased, where colleagues and work-mates would gather

together and short speeches might be made by an employer. Similar gatherings were held by

neighbourhood organisations, social circles, political groups, sports clubs and so on.48

Post-War Commemoration

After the war, memorials proliferated across the city. Reflecting the highly fractured responses of

Italian society to the war itself, memorialisation was heterogeneous, as all kinds of interest groups

erected their own monuments, for a variety of reasons: to mourn, to commemorate, or to prove

loyalty.49 A few examples must suffice here to indicate this diversity. The Jewish community of

Rome, emancipated from the Ghetto only in 1870, saw the war as an opportunity to demonstrate their

loyalty and italianità, and with this end in mind a roll of honour was maintained during the war. In

1921 a plaque was affixed to the outside of the imposing Art Nouveau Synagogue, dedicated to

seventy-five Roman Jews who died ‘fighting for Italian independence’, of whom seventy-three had

fallen during the war of 1915-1918. The inauguration ceremony on 19 June was attended by the King

and the victorious Chief of General Staff Armando Diaz as well as large crowds representing most of

the population of the Ghetto.50

Rome was also the location of official military commemorations, as various service branches

commemorated their roles in the war at their respective national headquarters. On 13 February 1920

the engineers inaugurated their refurbished museum in Castel Sant’Angelo, adding an exhibition on

their achievements during the war, with an accompanying publication.51 The Bersaglieri monument

at Porta Pia, location of their triumphant entry to Rome on 20 September 1870, was updated to include

their service in 1915-1918. Meanwhile, the Guardia della Finanza, the military financial police,

commissioned a memorial to be placed on the newly renamed Viale XXI Aprile opposite their

46 Il Messaggero, 8 May 1916. 47 Riosa, p. 17 (see image on p. 94). 48 For example, canoeing club memorials. See images in Vidotto et al. p.79; Staderini, p. 425. 49 On the various Roman organisations which took the initiative in creating memorials, see Riosa, pp. 13-21. 50 Stefano Caviglia, L’identità salvata: Gli ebrei di Roma tra fede e nazione 1870-1938 (Rome-Bari: Laterza,

1996)., pp. 168-9. 51 Albo di alcune dell più gloriose azioni compiute da truppe del genio durante la Guerra 1915-1918 (Rome:

Stabilimento Poligrafico per l’Associazione della Guerra, 1920).


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headquarters and main barracks.52 In 1925 a competition was announced for the design, with the new

monument inaugurated in 1930 (and was fully restored in 2006). The monument exemplifies fascist

thinking on the war and its commemoration: the terms of the competition specified that ‘I caduti per

la patria sono immortali: il monumento non dovrà avere, quindi, carattere funerario’ [Those who die

in the service of the nation are immortal: the monument should not, therefore, have a funereal

character].53 The inscription on the monument uses the present tense; there is no evocation of death

or mourning. Like the inscription ‘Presente’ on the enormous Ossuary of Redipuglia, or the

importance of the same word in the fascist liturgy,54 this shows that the fallen are still in service:

‘Animose avanguardie / sulle alpi e sui mari / che incoronano l’Italia’ [Watchful advance guards/ on

the mountains and the seas / which protect Italy]. These men are ‘pietre tutelari’ [keystones] who

‘proteggono con le armi / il territorio e la finanza dello Stato’ [with their arms protect / the territory

and finances of the State].55 Under fascism, the dead were not demobilised.56

But other views of the conflict were possible: many early monuments made reference to justice

and freedom, evoking liberal, democratic and even socialist interpretations of the war. In Monte

Mario, one 1920 memorial offered the inscription ‘Patria – Libertà – Lavoro’ [Nation – Liberty –

Work]. In 1922 the Roman tram-workers’ association erected two memorials to its fallen comrades.

The first, in a public location, included a conventional patriotic inscription, while the second was

inside their workers’ association building in Via La Spezia, hidden from the public, and expressed a

message of solidarity with the dead, evoking ‘fratellanza’ [brotherhood] with the fallen.57 After 1922

new memorials were increasingly affected by the fascist homogenising mission, but only one existing

monument was actually pulled down.58 In 1928 the Trastevere branch of Fascist Party erected their

own monument as a result of their dissatisfaction with the ‘liberal’ inscription on the existing local

memorial as well as destroying a second local monument erected in 1922 by a republican group

celebrating ‘Soldati del lavoro e della libertà’ [soldiers of work and freedom] and evoking the

examples of Goffredo Mameli and Giuseppe Mazzini.59 Instead, the fascist installation – much larger

and more elaborate than the republican memorial – looked optimistically toward the ‘nuovo impero

di Roma / nel mondo’ [the new empire of Rome in the world].60 There were exceptions to the trend

for celebratory rather than reflective memorials under the new regime: as late as 1928 an ex-

52 21 April 753 B.C., supposedly the day of the foundation of Rome, became a national holiday under Fascism. 53 Simona Battisti, ‘La fabbrica dell’arte: Tipologie e modelli’, in La Memoria Perduta, pp. 39–52 (p. 45). 54 Gentile, Il Culto del Littorio, pp. 47-8. 55 Vidotto et al., La Memoria Perduta, p. 93. 56 For related ideas in France and Germany see Trevisan and Julien, pp. 435–6. 57 Bartolini, pp. 56-7. 58 In some towns the ‘monument wars’ were violent. Foot, pp. 71-74. 59 Riosa, pp. 16 and 26. 60 This monument still stands in Piazza Mastai though certain fascist terms and symbols were erased after the

Second World War.


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combatants’ association in working-class Testaccio erected a monument in the local park which

retained a distinctly elegiac tone, speaking of ‘le bellezze d’un sacrificio’ [the beauties of sacrifice]

and ‘l’orgogliosa poesia del ricordo’ [the proud poetry of recollection].

In a further example of fascist failure to govern local forms of commemoration, party

functionaries in the Campo Marzio area tried, in 1934, to relocate the rione memorial to a more

‘suitable’ high-profile location near Campo de’ Fiori. But local people preferred the tranquillity of

the spot where the parish church of San Agostino had erected a plaque in 1925, and the party’s efforts

were thwarted.61 This church monument was relatively unusual, as religious institutions lagged

behind the state and civil society in promoting commemoration: the only specifically religious ‘site

of memory’ created was a Memorial Crypt dedicated to fallen priests beneath the church of St

Catherine of Siena in Via XXIV Maggio.62 Unlike the tradition of the parish war memorial in Britain

memorials in or adjacent to churches were very much the minority in Rome. Some examples are

found in the Rione Monti at San Martino and Madonna dei Monti, while the 1919 memorial inside

the church of Sant’Eusebio was supplemented in 1925 by a civic memorial directly outside the

church, honouring many of the same individuals, suggesting the primacy of secular over religious

commemoration.63

Not all memorials were made of stone: in the upper-class Parioli neighbourhood a memorial park

created in the grounds of the Villa Glori. A national scheme to create memorial parks was introduced

by fascist veteran Dario Lupi in November 1922, and within a year over 1000 had been inaugurated.

The Roman ‘Park of Remembrance’ was evocatively located on the site of a Risorgimento battle in a

park which was an established leisure destination for Roman families. A tree or shrub was planted

for each of the estimated 7,000 Roman war dead, each labelled with the name of the soldier it

honoured. This carefully landscaped pseudo-rustic idyll was officially inaugurated in May 1924 and

was very popular with local visitors for several years. But by the 1930s the memorial garden had

already fallen into disarray and disuse – a site of forgetting rather than of memory.64 The

establishment of a monument was no guarantee of its ongoing use or relevance.

61 Stefania Bonelli, ‘Gli spazi della memoria: La scelta dei luoghi’, in La Memoria Perduta, pp. 29–37 (p. 31). 62 Staderini, pp. 427-8. 63 Bonelli, pp. 30-1. 64 Flaminia Iacono, ‘Il Parco della Rimembranza di Roma’ in La Memoria Perduta, 245–55 (pp. 245-52).


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One of the most widely-used forms of both individual and collective commemoration was through

publications, a phenomenon without parallel in the context of the First World War.65 The historian

Oliver Janz has compiled a bibliography of around 2300 volumes honouring roughly 1500

individuals: some were nationally-known figures but the majority were ordinary young officers (82%)

and a few NCOs from relatively privileged backgrounds, including several from Roman families.66

Unsurprisingly, given that they were mainly produced by bereaved families, these pamphlets and

booklets are overwhelmingly concentrated on grief and mourning rather than patriotic consolation or

propagandistic example. These texts, produced during and immediately after the war, highlight the

role of personal relationships and the importance of the family, especially the mother; they also

represent a claim for individualism in memory which went against the homogenising forces of

national commemoration.67

Occasionally, such publications were collective rather than individual, celebrating a group of

young men.68 One example was the wartime publication of speeches by the rector of the University

of La Sapienza in small celebratory booklets, in honour of fallen students who were granted

posthumous honorary degrees at ceremonies in the university’s Aula Magna. After the war many

Roman schools and orphanages produced similar volumes, often including extracts of letters from the

front sent by the pupils and ex-pupils celebrated therein. As Staderini observes, such publications

were as much in honour of the institution which had ‘given’ these young men to the nation as of the

individuals themselves.69 Collective commemoration of this type introduced a third focus, neither

nation nor individual, and thus further complicated the messages conveyed.

This brief survey illustrates some popular reactions within Rome to the patriotic imperative of state-

sanctioned forms of commemoration both before and after the fascist seizure of power, and some of

the ways in which ‘independent’ memories existed alongside and interacted with these official forms.

During the First World War, didactic example in the form of monuments accompanied ceremonial

expressions of grief; afterwards, ceremonies increasingly presented a celebratory view of the war

while monuments could offer a range of interpretations from solidarity to triumphalism. Mourning

and grief continued to find some expression in the city up to the late 1920s and beyond, despite the

contrary demands of patriotic consolation and nationalist example. It is significant that ideas about

65 On the comparable phenomenon of Israeli Yizkor books, see Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Private Pain and Public

Remembrance in Israel’, in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 177-204. 66 Oliver Janz and Fabrizio Dolci, Non Omnis Moriar: Gli opuscoli di necrologia per i caduti italiani nella Grande

Guerra (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003). 67 Janz and Dolci, pp. 41-2. 68 Janz and Dolci, p. 12. 69 Staderini, pp. 426-7.


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romanità and the move towards a nationalist memory pre-date the March on Rome, suggesting that

fascist memory was not wholly new or wholly discontinuous. The range of responses and the

mobilisation of traditional codes of cultural practice suggest that despite the different political

climate, the memory and commemoration of the war in Italy were by no means dissimilar from

practice in other countries. This diversity, which endured well into fascism, showed that Romans of

different classes and political opinions retained the agency to express their own memories of the war

and to resist or reinterpret hegemonic national myths. The failure of either the liberal or the fascist

regime to effectively establish a unified memory is significant, and reflects both the nature of Rome

itself and the diversity of memories about the war. John Agnew argues that ‘there were too many

different memories encapsulated in the city to effect a successful transition. […] Rome defied all

attempts to turn its historic centre into a site of commemoration and ritual for the new Italian state.’70

It is clear that the success of fascist culture in dominating the imaginative landscapes of Roman

citizens was limited when it came to the memory and commemoration of the First World War. The

tensions between private mourning and public memory endured well into the fascist regime.

70 John Agnew, ‘The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1870-1943’,

Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 80:4 (1998), 229–240, p. 229.

‘Public ceremonies, private mourning: the First World War in Roman memory’

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