Chapel of the fallen - Vela Cemetery

The Vela and its surroundings, rich in orchards and ancient farms, have been a destination for walks since the times of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). Cardinal Marcello Cervini, papal legate to the Council of Trent and later pope with the name of Marcellus II for only 22 days in 1555, also went on horseback. The first cemetery of the village was built where today the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano is located, in order to allow its reconstruction in 1836 it was temporarily moved to the place called "Prà de Castello". The current cemetery was built in 1843 and underwent a first restoration in 1856. In the meantime, the population of Vela, the Villa di Capo of the time, Luigi de Mozzi (Trento 18/11/1860 - Trento 19/05 / 1941, buried in the cemetery of Vela), became the promoter of an expansion of the cemetery area which, between 1919 and 1920, assumed its current dimensions. Thanks to the research carried out in the historical archive of the Municipality of Trento by the architect. Daniela Tessarin of the Construction Service, we know that it was on this occasion that it was decided to build a "chapel" to serve as a mortuary, ossuary and monument in memory of the sixteen soldiers of Vela who died during the First World War, "so that - wrote the Capo Villa to the Municipal Council of Trento - whoever, buried in a foreign land, would have been forgotten over time would remain permanently linked ". According to archival documents, the project of the "splendid and artistic chapel" was carried out by the unidentified engineer. Martinuzzi; it is probably the arch. Marco Martinuzzi (Murano 13/09/1877 - Trento 30/11/1949, buried in the monumental cemetery of Trento) who in the same years designed in Trento, among other things, the Dorigoni Passage, the Garbari Gallery and the day hotel (Palazzina Liberty). The architectural features of the portal and the wooden canopy support this hypothesis. Unfortunately, the design of the facade of the chapel was not found. The initiative was led by the Capo Villa, the Curate and several citizens who fought over the money, the offer of land and the supply of working days and building materials.
Among them there is the Baron Mario de Salvotti who offered the columns, the portal and the threshold of the chapel. The municipal warehouses supplied the stone material for the construction of the four-hole window that surmounts the portal, a material in turn resulting from the renovation of the Trento Cathedral in the years following the First World War. The work was completed in April 1920. There is no confirmation that the cemetery chapel was consecrated or blessed, but a note from the then parish priest, Fr. Ermenegildo Tonelli, of 24 March 1921, informs us that an inauguration ceremony had already been held. The portal, built in simple and harmonic Neo-Renaissance lines, is preceded by a small narthex with a wooden roof supported by two columns and engraved in beautiful capital letters on the entablature with the dedicatory phrase "MCMXIV IN MEMORY OF THE FALLEN OF VELA MCMXVIII". The interior of the chapel, the only room and wooden coffered ceiling, has on the back wall a simple brick altar decorated with a large bronze crucifix on wood dated 1928 and on the side walls two bronze plates with the names of the fallen della Vela in the first and second world war, respectively on the right and left.

In addition to the chapel, the Vela cemetery hosts other works of historical and cultural interest that deserve to be known and valued. Among the oldest are the tombs of the de Mozzi families, Perzolli (adorned with a valuable marble sculptural group by an unknown artist), Mosna and Gardumi; among the recent tombs we must mention Festini Brosa Dossi (with the original bronze composition dedicated to the elementary teacher Carmen Dossi), Campestrini (with a bronze statue of San Francesco by L. Degasperi, 1979) and Mazzalai (on which the Bronze Good Shepherd of I . Magrini, 1970), all evidence of a funerary art perhaps minor but far from the contemporary standardization of styles and executions.

(edited by Joseph Tassone)