Italian Army in the Upper Soča Region, 25. 5. 1915 - 23. 10. 1917

The title of this exhibition could be completed with the addition “Chapter Three”, because it is the third in the recent years’ series of exhibitions on the activities of the Italian Royal Army in the mountainous world of the Isonzo Front. The 2010 exhibition on the combats on the notorious Mt. Mrzli vrh was outstanding for the amount of its documentary materials about the fights on this mountain between the Italian and the Austro-Hungarian armies. Two years later an exhibition on the hinterland of the 4th Army Corps was staged and it brought numerous pieces of new information and new images, and its narrative was concluded with the words: “In the coming years we shall ‘visit’ the rear of the 4th Army Corps in the wider areas of Drežnica and Bovec.”

This promise had to be fulfilled, partly at least, in the year when we commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Kingdom of Italy’s entrance into war and the beginning of horrors which lasted for twenty-nine months along the River Soča.

About his early experiences on the battlefield speaks the bersagliere Virgilio Bonamore. His account already ends with the 31st of August when he was sent to further training to become an officer. He certainly continued his writing, but unfortunately we lost trace of his relatives who had presented this account to us, so we do not know his destiny.  The most outstanding seem to be the memories of the lieutenant Mario Muccini of the 147th Regiment of the Caltanisetta Brigade which was deployed on the notorious Mt. Mrzli vrh from January 1917 until the Battle of Kobarid when it was destroyed. He published his very critical description of the circumstances and the results of the fights in 1938. More to the front in his book than the narrative of the destructive effects of arms is his awareness that nobody understands the soldiers in the trenches. They are understood neither by the “absconders” in the cabins at the foot of the mountains, nor by the Italian public, often neither by their relatives and neighbours. They are left to themselves in some other world called the Battlefield. They become mere little dots tossed over the coloured squares on the maps of the generals.