📚 FROM OUR ARCHIVE
The Group was founded in 1963, but its celebration had to wait more than a year. The first pages of the Col Maòr tell us why, and how that rainy Sunday went.
Umbrellas at ten o’clock
The sky, the newsletter would later report, “had opened its floodgates exactly at 10 o’clock”. The Alpini procession makes its way through the streets of Salce under a canopy of umbrellas, and the band refuses to stop: it marches on “as far as the Appalto, followed by a crowd of cheering children”. It is October 1964, and the Alpini Group of Salce is celebrating its own birth more than a year late.
Because the Group, in fact, already existed. When the first issue of the Col Maòr, written and edited by Mario Dell’Eva, had come out that April, the Alpini Group of Salce already had its officers: Giovanni Dal Pont as Group leader, Dell’Eva himself as secretary and treasurer, Luigi Capraro and Narciso Colbertaldo as auditors. They met at Narciso’s bar. There were 54 members, and the aim was to reach “about eighty”.
In his greeting Dal Pont thanked “the alpino Mario Dell’Eva, who began and very skilfully managed to bring us to this union”. The same issue carried a promise, too: the pennant (gagliardetto) would be donated by “the son and member of our Group, Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Zaglio”, son of the general whose name the Group bears (his story is here). All that was missing was the celebration. And that would have to wait.
The Vajont and a year of mourning
The August issue explains why: “Since the Board of the Belluno Section has decided to observe a year of mourning, in memory of those lost in the Vajont disaster”, the Group’s celebration “can only take place after 10 October”. On 9 October 1963 the landslide from Mount Toc had wiped out Longarone and the villages around it. For a whole year the Alpini of Belluno gave up every celebration.
Salce did not sit idle in the meantime. A new sign went up at the “Da Narciso” bar, a small cabinet was found to keep the pennant safe, and the Group took on a commitment to the village nursery school.
The young Alpini at Longarone
The Col Maòr returned to those hours in October, in an article signed “Dem”, Dell’Eva’s pen name. It tells the night in fragments: the news arriving, Longarone gone, the young conscript Alpini at work among the ruins. Two young men from the village appear only as initials, “G.T., our fellow villager” and “the ‘bocia’ V.F.”, and the last sentence belongs to them: “Our heart, deeply moved, promoted them to ‘veci’ on the field”.
“It will not be a village fair”
In the same October issue the Group leader could at last announce the day: “We had been waiting for this day for about a year, since the unforgotten Vajont disaster had imposed on us a year of symbolic mourning”. And he made one thing clear from the start: it would not be “a ‘sagra’, a carnival”. By 30 September membership had already risen to 58. The printed programme ran to the minute, and ended with a drink taken standing and a barrack-square command:
- 9.30: meeting on the churchyard of Col di Salce;
- 9.45: blessing of the pennant in front of the War Memorial;
- 10.00: Holy Mass in the parish church;
- 10.45: wreath at the War Memorial;
- 11.00: speech;
- 11.30: a drink at Narciso’s, “standing up like horses” (in dialect, «in pié come i cavai»);
- 12.00: “Dismissed!”.
A rainy Sunday
In November the newsletter could write: “The official inauguration of the Group is done”. We already know the rain came at ten. The rest is filled in by later records. The 60th Anniversary Book remembers the first standard-bearer, Primo Da Rold, and the banner of the Belluno Section; and a Mass in a parish church “packed with people and Military Authorities”. The Group thanked the band of the “Settimo” (the 7th Alpini Regiment) and its conductor, Warrant Officer Dal Fabbro. At lunch there were flowers for the godmother. The bill for the day: 40,000 lire.
Forty years later, in 2004, the Col Maòr could laugh about it with a line that became famous: “A wet Group is a lucky Group!… But not wet — soaked!!!”. In a photograph of the time the parish priest, don Gioacchino Belli, blesses the pennant; the godmother is Mrs Eugenia Zaglio, the general’s daughter.
When the sources do not agree
Placing the documents side by side brings out some differences, which we record without picking one at random.
- The date. The day of 25 October 1964 appears in the 60th Anniversary Book. The 1964 issues only confirm that the celebration took place after 10 October and before November.
- The band. The Col Maòr of November 1964 and that of 2004 speak of the band of the “Settimo”; the 60th Anniversary Book of the band of the “Cadore” brigade. We follow the contemporary source and point out the difference.
- The foundation. The 2004 Col Maòr writes that the Group was “founded on 19 March 1963 with about fifty members”. The report to the general meeting of January 1965, however, lists the “foundation of the Group” among the milestones of 1964. The two dates may refer to different moments, the birth and the formal founding meeting, but for now this is a hypothesis to be checked against the minutes.
This is also why the Group’s anniversaries are counted from 1964: 40th in 2004, 50th in 2014, 60th in 2024.
After the celebration
By the end of December there were 66 members, and alongside them ten honorary ones: nine men fallen in war and the godmother of the pennant. Among the plans for 1965 there was already a big one, the Salce War Memorial, which would be inaugurated in 1967 (its story, in Italian). And ten years after that drenched Sunday, for the tenth anniversary, the celebration would move to the Col Maòr hill (read the story).
Help us remember
- Can you recognise the people in the inauguration photographs?
- Does anyone keep the minutes of the Group’s foundation or the printed programme of the celebration?
- Who were “G.T.” and the “bocia” V.F., the two young men from Salce remembered at Longarone?
Write to us from the Contact page: every contribution will be checked and, if confirmed, will enter MEMORIA.
