Cesare Battisti Mausoleum

The Mausoleum, with its circular shape borrowed from the classical world, is characterised by a skilful play of contrasts - filled and empty spaces, plays of light and shadow - and the choice of materials, all coming from Trentino. Particularly striking is the colonnade, rising over the main body of the building: sixteen columns, over ten metres high, form a circular crown housing in the centre the altar where the large memorial area rests. Three large openings lead inside the monument, where in the crypt a small room contains the sarcophagus with Battisti‘s remains.
Cesare Battisti. Born in Trento on 4 February 1875, Cesare Battisti was a scholar, journalist and politician. From 1895 he founded and directed many weekly papers and magazines, including Il Popolo, a privileged tribune from which to spread socialist and nationalist beliefs, and to conduct his battle for the autonomy of Trentino from Austrian Tyrol. In 1902 he became city councillor in Trento and in 1911 member of Parliament in Vienna. In 1914 he was also elected at the Innsbruck Diet. With the outbreak of World War I he enlisted as a volunteer in the Alpini troops of the Italian army. On the 10th of July he was captured by the Austrian army, tried in Trento for high treason and, as an Austrian citizen, sentenced to death. The sentence was executed on the 12th of July 1916 in the pit of the Buonconsiglio castle.

1916, on the evening of July 12, Cesare Battisti dies in the pit of the Buonconsiglio Castle. Around him and Fabio Filzi there are dozens of soldiers watching the scene and many cameras that obsessively document the tragic moment of death. The Austrian propaganda transforms Battisti in the symbol of Italian infidelity to the alliance that the Reign would have betrayed by fighting alongside France and England against the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The news of the death sentence of Battisti and Filzi arrive also in Italy. The clearer the exceptional character of Battisti’s death becomes – because it is different from the anonymous one of thousands of corpses that accumulate every day in the trenches – the more the interest of the Italian press grows. The fact that the situation is extraordinary is the premise for the transformation of the protagonist, who is no longer the real Cesare Battisti – with his contradictions and different facets – but the “Myth of the Martyr”.

The strength assumed by Cesare Battisti’s symbol during the war did not fade after the end of the Great War and the annexation of Trentino and Alto Adige to Italy. Trento and Trieste – the symbolic cities of the interventionist propaganda of 1915 – are now Italian to all intents and purposes. Alongside the great war cemeteries on the Carso, also the pit of Buonconsiglio Castle, now renamed the pit of Martyrs, becomesa famous destination: the authorities who visit the city, veterans and school groups pass here on a lay pilgrimage. On May 26, 1935, the mausoleum with Cesare Battisti’s remains was inaugurated on the Doss Trento. Mussolini did not participate in the event but visited the monument, designed by Ernesto Fagiuoli, only in summer.