Redipuglia War Memorial
Italian war cemetery
The Redipuglia War Memorial (Italian: Sacrario militare di Redipuglia) is a World War I memorial located on the Karst Plateau near the village of Fogliano Redipuglia, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy. It is the largest war memorial in Italy and one of the largest in the world, housing the remains of 100,187 Italian soldiers killed between 1915 and 1917 in the twelve battles fought on the Karst and Isonzo front.
Memorial
The shrine was built between 1935 and 1938 on Monte Sei Busi, one of the many rocky hills of the Karst Plateau whose possession was bitterly contested during the early battles of the Isonzo (Monte Sei Busi was attacked by the Italian Army during the First and Second Battle of the Isonzo, and finally captured during the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo). It was designed by architect Giovanni Greppi and solemnly inaugurated on 18 September 1938 in the presence of Benito Mussolini and over 50,000 soldiers who had fought on the Isonzo front in World War I. The Colle di Sant'Elia, a hill in front of Monte Sei Busi, was already the site of the war cemetery of the Italian Third Army, which fought in this sector of the front from 1915 to 1917 (the cemetery contained the remains of over 30,000 fallen, which were transferred to the newly built war memorial).
The shrine, built on the side of the hill, consists of 22 horizontal platforms of stone, arrayed in step-like progression, hosting the remains of 39,857 identified soldiers, arranged in alphabetic order. The top frieze of each platforms, above the name plaques, reads repetitively Presente (Present). Above the last step, a votive chapel is lined by two large mass graves holding the remains of 60,330 unknown soldiers. The chapel and two adjacent rooms contain personal belongings of Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers. At the base of the memorial, six sepulchres contain the remains of Prince Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Aosta (the commander of the Third Army, who died in 1931 and asked to be buried among his men) and five generals killed in action. Leading up the monument is the Via Eroica ("heroic path"), which is flanked by 38 bronze plaques with the names of 38 locations on the Karst plateau where the fighting was bloodiest.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Redipuglia War Memorial” as italian war cemetery. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as italian war cemetery. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q498934. The Library of Congress control number is n2024009138. Authority coordinates are 45.852, 13.490. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1917, 1935 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “Redipuglia War Memorial” 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.