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The history of the Italian Unknown Soldier

The Unknown Soldier is an Italian soldier who died in World War I. His body has not been identified and he is buried inside of the Altare della Patria in Rome. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a symbolic tomb that represents all the worriors fallen in the war.

In Italy the first official proposal for an Unknown Soldier Memorial is Attributed to Giulio Douhet in 1920, an aviator and veteran, chief of staff of the thirteenth corps in Val Canonca and Valtellina. Its purpose was to honor the sacrifices and heroism in the national community in the shape of an unknown soldier.

This idea was picked up by Mr. Cesare Maria De Vecchi, who had her own presentation to the Chamber of Deputies, a bill aimed at building design, also in Italy, of a monument dedicated to all Italian war dead soldiers.

The law was later passed by parliament. Following the Royal Decree of 24 August 1919, the War Department constituted a committee which was given the task of identifying eleven corpses of unidentified Italian soldiers. One of these corpses will be buried in the Altare della Patria inside a tomb that become the monument of the Italian Unknown Soldier. The choice of the eleven corpses was not accidental: each came from a precise area of the Italian front of World War I.

The eleven coffins were taken provisionally in Gorizia and then were transferred to the Basilica of Aquileia. Meanwhile, the tomb was built inside the Altare della Patria in Rome.

The unidentified soldier laid to rest at the monument in Rome was selected on the 28 October 1921 in Aquileia’s Church by Maria Bergamas, the mother of an Italian soldier, Antonio Bergamas, who never returned home. Her own son was most probably interred somewhere in an unmarked or unidentified grave, perhaps even in a mass grave. Italy's Tomb of the Unknown therefore became a fitting memorial to her own lost son.

The coffin was placed on a selected railway hearse. The journey to Rome of was accomplished by train. There were many Italians who were waiting for the tomb to honor the figure of the Unknown Soldier.

In Rome the flags of all the regiments of the Italian armed forces and representatives of the combatants, widows and mothers of the fallen, received the arrival of the body of the Unknown Soldier. The corpse was buried with solemn ceremony at the Altare della Patria on the 4 November 1921.

The Italian case is more murkier than the English case, mainly because individual allegiances, national identity, and Church authority were far more than elsewhere precarius and in conflict with each other, exacerbating political and social conflict. Thus, the official and more political origin of the Unknown Soldier in Italy never quite meets with its imaginary one.