Monumento ai caduti gemonesi nella Prima Guerra Mondiale

In the small square before Gemona's town hall stands the city's First World War memorial: an altar of Istrian stone and a bronze group of a mother guiding her child's hand toward it. Designed by the sculptor Aurelio Mistruzzi after a competition, it was unveiled in June 1922 to mourn more than three hundred local dead.

Why it matters

Every Friulian town carries a memorial to the Great War, but Gemona's is documented to an unusual degree. The official historic-centre itinerary explains that more than three hundred soldiers of the town died in the conflict, that a memorial was planned in the immediate postwar years, and that a regional competition awarded the commission to Mistruzzi, a sculptor whose dates are given there as 1880 to 1960. The work is also catalogued by the state: the General Catalogue of Cultural Heritage records the "mother with child" altar monument among the artworks of Gemona del Friuli, attributed to Aurelio Mistruzzi and placed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The memorial represents the losses of the First World War in Gemona's civic history.

What to notice

The altar (ara) was worked in Istrian stone by local masons Giuseppe Elia and Albino Tuti. The bronze group shows a mother guiding her child's hand toward the altar of the fallen, a domestic image of mourning and remembrance. The memorial faces the civic buildings of the medieval town. Nearby, the bronze Porta della Memoria of 2006 on the town hall loggia commemorates victims of the earthquake.

Context and history

The monument belongs to the wave of commemoration that crossed Italy between the armistice of 1918 and the mid-1920s. Gemona moved quickly: the official itinerary records planning in the immediate postwar period and the choice of design through a competition limited to the region, won by Mistruzzi. The work was inaugurated in June 1922 in the small square in front of the Municipio. A community publication on the postwar years also places the unveiling among public events of June 1922. Since 1922 the monument has stood at the head of the historic centre.