Gruppo Alpini "Gen. Pietro Zaglio" di Salce – ANA Belluno Section
Help the living to honour the dead – Nardo Caprioli
More than 200 First World War remnants have been neutralised at high altitude by bomb-disposal experts of the 2nd Alpine Sapper Engineer Regiment. An operation combining safety, history and the memory of the mountains.
One hundred and nine years on, the Bainsizza still bears the marks of one of the hardest battles of the Great War. In August 1917 the Belluno, Pieve di Cadore, Monte Antelao and Monte Pelmo battalions of the 7th Alpini fought there too.
August 1917, the Isonzo front. Arturo Toscanini, who has come to the front to visit his son Walter, serving in the artillery, persuades General Capello to let him put together a military band. On 26 August he leads it to the summit of Monte Santo, captured only hours earlier, and conducts marches and anthems there for four days under Austrian fire.
In 1918 the Hungarian Honvéd regiments held the Alano basin between Quero and Fener, a place they called “the mousetrap”. Their story is also ours.
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.
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.
In 1916 about two hundred Alpini hauled a six-tonne 149 mm gun, nicknamed “Ippopotamo”, to over 3,200 metres on the Adamello: the story of one of the most extraordinary feats of the White War.
