Gruppo Alpini "Gen. Pietro Zaglio" di Salce – ANA Belluno Section
Help the living to honour the dead – Nardo Caprioli
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On 23 February 2026 Italians and Hungarians unveiled at the Ghertele, on the Asiago plateau, a monument to Győző Zemplén, the Hungarian physicist who refused exemption and fell here in 1916.
In 1918 Helen Johns Kirtland, an American photographer for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, followed the battles of the Piave and Monte Grappa from the front line, documenting Italian soldiers with courage and skill. Her photographs, kept at the Library of Congress, tell a story long left in the shadows.
After Caporetto, Veneto and the Belluno area lived through a year of occupation, famine and deportations: the “An de la Fan”, the year of hunger, and the silent resistance of its people.
More than 2,000 military cableways and 2,300 km of rope: how the Italian Corps of Engineers supplied the high-altitude trenches of the Great War, in the words of a 1917 war correspondent.
From the 1990s to today, the Black Feathers on international missions: UNIFIL in Lebanon, Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan. How the Alpini went from guarding the borders to building peace.
There is an old saying among the Alpini: “Taking the mule away from an Alpino is like tearing the feather from his hat.”
A journey to the origins of the Alpini: from the ancient Alpine legions of the Roman Empire to the official birth of the Corps in 1872, a story two thousand years long.
The cold that broke the ARMIR during the retreat from Russia in the winter of 1942-43, told through the pages of Bedeschi, Revelli and Rigoni Stern: memory, suffering and dignity on the harshest front.
September 1918: the Italian 35th Division under General Mombelli in the last battles on the Macedonian front, the Bulgarian collapse, the truth about the “10,000 prisoners” and the occupation of Bulgaria.
A reflection on what it really means to be an Alpino: not just uniform and rank, but values of humility, service, friendship and belonging that last a lifetime. It starts from a provocative remark heard during the National Gathering.
