Battle of Voltri
1796 battle of the War of the First Coalition
The Battle of Voltri was fought on 10 April 1796 in Voltri, Italy, during the War of the First Coalition. The battle saw two Habsburg Austrian columns under the overall direction of Johann Peter Beaulieu attack a reinforced French brigade under Jean-Baptiste Cervoni. After a skirmish lasting several hours, the Austrians forced Cervoni to withdraw west along the coast to Savona. Voltri is now part of the western suburbs of the major Italian port of Genoa. The battle was the opening engagement of the Montenotte campaign and the broader Italian campaign of 1796-1797, which would ultimately end the war a year later.
In the spring of 1796, Beaulieu was installed as the new commander of the combined armies of Austria and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in northwest Italy. His opposite number was also new to the job of army commander. Napoleon Bonaparte arrived from Paris to direct the French Army of Italy. Bonaparte immediately began planning an offensive, but Beaulieu struck first by launching an attack against Cervoni's somewhat overextended force. After the action, the Austrian commander found himself in a position in which it was difficult to march to the support of his right wing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Voltri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.