The Tricolour that was never withdrawn

A mezzanine in the Galleria

The first home of the Associazione Nazionale Alpini (ANA, the National Alpini Association) was not a headquarters: it was a narrow mezzanine, lent as a courtesy by the Grande Italia café-restaurant inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Men just back from the Great War, few resources, a lot of papers to put somewhere. The Association had been founded on 8 July 1919, driven by veterans who did not want to lose what had been forged on the ridges and in the trenches.

The first thing they did, once settled in that mezzanine, was to hang a large tricolour flag from one of the big windows. Not a decoration. A statement: we are here, and this is the symbol for which we lost comrades.

That is where the story begins of a piece of cloth that today, after a long and delicate restoration, rests in a display case at the national headquarters in Via Marsala, Milan.

A flag received as a gift

On 20 June 1920, at the Società del Giardino in Milan, the ANA inaugurated its first official Tricolour. It did not buy it: it received it as a gift from a group of Milanese women, chaired by Countess Visconti di Modrone.

This detail is worth dwelling on, because it says more than it seems. The first flag of the Alpini was born from a civic gesture, from outside the Association. It was the families, the wives, the mothers, the sisters of a city that had counted its dead who decided that those men deserved a symbol of their own. The ANA Tricolour was born this way, as a recognition received, not as a self-awarded ensign.

From that day on it accompanied the Association at its most important events. It remained in service until 1972, when it was replaced by a new Tricolour, this time without the Savoy coat of arms: the Republic had long since changed the flag, and the ANA brought its own banner into line. The first one, however, was not discarded. It was preserved.

Guard shifts, even at night

The early years were not easy. In post-war Milan, the Tricolour displayed in the Galleria annoyed those who contested the very idea of the Fatherland and mocked the sacrifice of the fallen. A document kept in the archive of the ANA Study Centre, taken from the article La prima casa (The first home) published in L’Alpino in July 2019 and quoted in full in the two restorers’ study, recalls that demonstrators had several times

“tried to tear down or set fire to the tricolour cloth, but we did not give in”

and that, to defend it, the Alpini were forced to organise shifts of volunteers, even at night.

Men only recently demobilised, with jobs to start again and families to put back on their feet, taking turns in the dark to guard a flag. It was not a symbolic or rhetorical episode: it was a watch, repeated, tiring, unpaid. And it worked. The ANA Tricolour was never withdrawn.

Anyone who knows the life of the local Groups knows that this is exactly how important things still work today: not with a single gesture, but with many shifts.

How it is made

The cloth measures about 118 by 123 centimetres. It is a fabric with vertical stripes in the three colours, cut from a single piece. In the centre of the white band the Savoy shield is embroidered, with the cross in white fabric and the light-blue border mounted on cardboard padding, topped by a crown, also embroidered, in multicoloured silk and gilded metal thread.

The flag is paired with a blue silk velvet bow, 127 centimetres long: a large knot with two long hanging ribbons, along which the words «ASSOCIAZIONE NAZIONALE – ALPINI» run in gilded metal thread, with embroidered coats of arms at the ends and golden fringes. Below the knot, a small ring made it possible to hang it from the pole.

It is not, to be honest, a masterpiece of textile art. The materials are of good quality but not exceptional, mass-produced. Its value lies entirely elsewhere.

Time, light and an excess of love

Half a century of use, followed by further decades hanging from its pole inside a display case, had done their work. Light had degraded the fibres from within: the red showed cuts and tears, the green a marked colour shift along the folds exposed to light, and the white band — the most fragile — was torn in several places, with actual gaps around the coat of arms.

At some point someone, in order to keep carrying it at public events, had tried to save it the way treasured things are saved at home: by gluing a thick PVC adhesive film over it, then sewing the white band sandwich-style between two sheets of polyethylene, and finally enclosing the whole flag in the same way. When the restorers took it apart, they found the cloth encased in five pieces of plastic of different sizes.

From a conservation point of view it is a disaster. From a human point of view it is a document: nobody wraps in plastic an object they do not care about. That home-made intervention, wrong in every respect, says how much the flag mattered.

The restoration, in simple words

The work was carried out by the restorers Patrizia Labianca and Graziella Palei, who presented their report at the 19th National Congress of IGIIC, the Italian Group of the International Institute for Conservation, in Udine in 2021.

The first phase was the most delicate: removing the plastic without taking the silk with it. The PVC was rigid, the fabric extremely thin. It was removed dry, mechanically, cutting away small portions that had already come loose one at a time and vacuuming up the crystallised adhesive.

What remained were stains of aged glue, impossible to treat with traditional methods without compromising what was left of the fabric. The solution came from a material developed for contemporary conservation: Nanorestore Gel hydrogels, transparent sheets able to hold the solvent inside them and release it only on the contact surface. Loaded with solvent, cut into three-centimetre squares, laid on with light pressure and left to work for about twenty minutes under a protective film, they absorbed the glue without the liquid penetrating the fibres. After each pass, a square of gel loaded only with water to rehydrate the silk.

Then came consolidation, different for each colour. The green and red bands were enclosed between a silk organza support on the back and a veil of crepeline on the front, both dyed to match and secured with rows of vertical stitches every five centimetres. The white band, too fragmented to be held by stitching alone, required a veil treated with adhesive and heat-bonded, bringing the edges of every tear back together; under the cross of the coat of arms an ivory silk taffeta, dyed specially, was inserted to fill the gaps visually.

The bow was also cared for: controlled vacuuming, repositioning of the loose threads of the lining, consolidation by stitching. On the velvet, too fragile, the choice was made not to intervene chemically.

Finally, the mounting: a wooden panel covered with soft fabric, the flag secured with stitching along the edges, the bow and the finial of the pole beside it, and a display case with the glass set about ten centimetres away.

One last time aloft

There is one step in the project that deserves attention, because it shows what happens when a relic is not yet a museum piece.

The Association had asked for something specific: to be able to raise the restored flag one last time, during the celebrations for the centenary of its foundation. Not a display: a real presentation, with the flag held high, as had always been done. The restorers designed the work with that request in mind too, calibrating the consolidation so that the cloth could bear its own weight once more.

Then the display case, the Council Room of the national headquarters, rest. But first, one last salute standing tall.

What concerns us

A relic is not only what remains of the past: it is a memory entrusted to future generations. This is the clearest lesson of the whole story, and it does not concern Milan alone.

In the local Groups too, in Salce too, there are objects that matter for the same reasons: a pennant, a hat, a group photograph with names written in pencil on the back, the registers, the volumes of the newsletter. None of these objects is rare. None is worth anything on the market. They matter because someone carried them, looked after them, brought them out on the right occasions and put them away with care. Their value is not in the cloth: it is in the hands that held them.

From this follows a small practical duty, not very solemn and very concrete: knowing where things are, writing down what they are, avoiding improvised remedies, asking the advice of those who know before gluing anything. The plastic on the ANA Tricolour teaches that even affection, without expertise, can do damage.

And there remains one last distinction, which the Alpini know from experience before theory. Benedetto Croce, in a 1944 essay, observed that love of one’s country is not a milder version of nationalism: it is its opposite, just as tenderness towards a person is the opposite of possession. That flag was defended for the first reason, not the second. And that is why, a hundred years later, it is still worth telling its story.

The flag at a glance

• First official banner of the Associazione Nazionale Alpini, inaugurated on 20 June 1920 at the Società del Giardino in Milan.
• Donated by a group of Milanese women chaired by Countess Visconti di Modrone.
• Measures about 118 × 123 cm; in the centre of the white band, the embroidered Savoy shield, topped by the crown.
• Completed by a blue silk velvet bow bearing the gilded words «ASSOCIAZIONE NAZIONALE – ALPINI».
• Used at the main ANA events until 1972, when it was replaced by a Tricolour without the Savoy coat of arms.
• Restored by Patrizia Labianca and Graziella Palei: removal of the plastics, cleaning with hydrogels, consolidation differentiated for the three bands.
• Raised one last time for the ANA centenary; today displayed in a case in the Council Room of the national headquarters in Milan.

Sources and further reading

• Patrizia Labianca, Graziella Palei, Un cimelio e la sua memoria: il restauro della bandiera tricolore dell’Associazione Nazionale Alpini di Milano, in Lo Stato dell’Arte 19. Atti del XIX Congresso Nazionale IGIIC, Palazzo Garzolini di Toppo Wassermann, Udine, 16-18 September 2021, Nardini Editore — full text (in Italian). This is the source of all the data on measurements, materials, state of conservation, restoration techniques and the current location of the flag.
• Nardini Editore, page for the proceedings volume Lo Stato dell’Arte 19 — nardinieditore.it
• Various authors, La prima casa, in L’Alpino, July 2019, pp. 10-11. The document from the ANA Study Centre archive on the attempts to tear down or burn the Tricolour and on the night-time guard shifts is quoted in this article and reproduced in the study by Labianca and Palei.
• Associazione Nazionale Alpini, The history of the ANA — ana.it
• Associazione Nazionale Alpini, Study Centre — ana.it
• L’Alpino, the ANA’s official monthly magazine — lalpino.net
• IGIIC, Italian Group of the International Institute for Conservation — igiic.org
• CSGI, University of Florence, Art Restoration: Nanorestore Gel hydrogels and nanoscience applied to conservation — csgi.unifi.it
• Benedetto Croce, Una parola desueta: l’amor di patria, in L’idea liberale. Contro le confusioni e gl’ibridismi. Scritti vari, Laterza, Bari, 1944. Quoted in the study by Labianca and Palei.

Photo credits

The historical images and the photographs of the restoration are taken from the paper by Patrizia Labianca e Graziella Palei, Un cimelio e la sua memoria: il restauro della bandiera tricolore dell’Associazione Nazionale Alpini di Milano, published in the Proceedings of the 19th IGIIC National Congress – Lo Stato dell’Arte 19, Udine 2021.