In the present text, I’m going to produce an executive summary of the Italian Unknown Soldier’s history and compare it to the British Unknown Soldier’s one.
First of all, the idea to celebrate the funeral of an Unknown soldier was colonel Giulio Douhet’s. He proposed to bury an unknown soldier in the Pantheon “where he could find his worthy tomb” to honor his heroism in his periodical called “Il Dovere”.
The idea was supported by Cesare Maria De Vecchi, who proposed a bill in order to build a monument dedicated to all the Italian soldiers who had died in the Great War to the Chamber of Deputies. The law was approved on 11 August 1921.
However, the government decided to bury him in the Altare della patria.
After that, the Ministry of War created a commission to choose eleven bodies from the major battlefields. The corpses didn’t wear any sign of identification and were all put in wooden coffins in order to make them indistinguishable.
They were later transferred to Aquileia’s basilica where was celebrated the state funeral. After that the Unknown Soldier was chosen by Maria Bergamas, who symbolized each mother who had lost her son because of the Great War.
The chosen one was put on a train to Rome, that travelled slowly to allow people to homage the soldier. The other corpses were buried near the basilica.
When the soldier arrived in the capitol, he was greeted by the soldiers’, the widows’ and the mothers’ representatives, guided by the king. He was buried in the Altare della Patria on 4 November 1921.
The Italian Unknown soldier’s celebration shows the same structure as the English one. The idea of the commemoration doesn’t come from the government, that approves the celebration and organizes it. In particular, a commission is selected in order to choose some unidentified corpses from the major battlefields. The soldier is chosen between them by a particular figure and, after celebrating a state funeral, he is sent to the capitol where he is finally buried.
However, overlooking the structure of the celebration, the key figures are completely different in the two cases.
First of all, while in Italy it was a military figure to propose the Unknown soldier’s burial, in England it was a religious figure (Reverend David Railton).
Indeed the Italian celebration is more patriotic than the English one, since the first is buried in the Altare della Patria, while the second is buried in Westminster Abbey. In addition, considering the soldiers’ epitaphs, we can observe that while the Italian one marks the love for the motherland and the proudness of the Italian mothers, the second underlines that the warrior gave life itself first for God and then for king and country.
Also, while the symbol of the mother is recurring in the Italian celebration, it’s almost absent in the English one. To tell the truth, the Italian unknown soldier was even chosen by a mother who had lost her son in the Great War as a symbol of all the other women who were in the same situation, while the English one was chosen by Brigadier Wyatt. It’s true that it was a military figure to choose the soldier, but it’s not relevant compared with the religious figure who chose the six corpses.
This can be found even in the websites I used to write this text. They all use a solemn language to convey a message of celebration of the Unknown soldier, but the Italian ones do it visibly more, supporting the idea of the warrior as a “hero who died for his motherland” and resulting even pompous.
In conclusion, the ritual of the Unknown soldier is common to different cultures such the Italian and the British one. However, even though the structure of the celebration is the same in each country, it’s impossible not to notice the great differences between the key figures of the commemoration.
In particular we can observe that, even though each country uses the celebration to reunite a nation divided by the Great War, Italy marks the patriotic aspect of the ritual while England underlines the religious one.