Places of Memory: the Bari Military Shrine

On a grey 25 April we thought of revisiting our recent history by visiting a very important, if a little sad, place. In the city of Bari, in the Japigia district, stands one of the most important treasures of our History: the Military Shrine of the Fallen Overseas. Inaugurated on 10 December 1967. The structure guards the remains of more than 70,000 Italian fallen on foreign soil. It is here that the bodies of soldiers who fell in Greece, Albania, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Germany and the Mediterranean, in the First and Second World Wars, at the front or in captivity, are gathered. Of these deceased, unfortunately, forty thousand have remained unknown. There is a plaque with the names of 140 Eritrean and Libyan Ascari whose remains, already entombed in the Tripoli shrine, were later relocated from that cemetery to Bari in 1972.

The shrine was designed and built by Lt. Col. of the Alpine Engineers Paolo Caccia Dominioni di Sillavengo. The complex consists of an enormous portico with an access staircase, beyond which is the Historical Museum, which briefly recalls the various phases of the Second World War and where numerous documents, photographs, sketches, uniforms, weapons, relics and personal effects are collected. Every day, at sunset, nine solemn tolls of a great bell, donated to the Shrine by all the combatant and armed associations, remind the living of all the Fallen, as engraved in its bronze: "Victi vivimus".