Museo del Nastro Azzurro

Within the monastic rooms of Santa Giustina, part of the collections of the Fondazione Museo Storico del Nastro Azzurro preserves two centuries of Italy's decorations for military valour: relics, weapons, uniforms, badges and documents from 1796 to 1961, assembled by decorated veterans themselves and kept today inside Mu.Sa., the museum of Salò.

Why it matters

The Blue Ribbon Museum documents an idea of remembrance rather than a battlefield: the lives of soldiers decorated for valour, told through the objects they carried home. The institute behind it, the Istituto del Nastro Azzurro fra Combattenti decorati al Valore Militare, was born in 1923 to unite decorated combatants and keep the memory of their deeds alive; the museum's own page traces its Salò origins to 1934, when a local group was founded by the physician and former Alpine officer Adolfo Battisti and the typographer Luigi Ebranati. Opened as a museum-sanctuary in 1949 and dedicated to Battisti, who had died of an infection contracted during a surgical operation after volunteering for war in 1942, it is presented by the museum as unique in Italy for its subject. It adds a longer arc of military history to Salò’s memory landscape.

What to notice

The displayed material spans roughly two hundred years, from the Napoleonic campaigns to the mid-twentieth century: medals and decorations with their citations, sidearms and weapons, uniforms and insignia, manuscripts, photographs and printed propaganda. The museum organises its holdings around three themes: the personal stories of decorated veterans, the wartime events of the old Salò district, and the propaganda produced around them. Citation documents place the official language of military valour awards beside personal family relics. Because the galleries are part of the Fondazione Museo Storico del Nastro Azzurro's holdings rather than the civic collection, the display has the character of a memorial, deliberate and votive, which the label "museum-sanctuary" captures. The wall texts trace how the meaning of ‘valore militare’ changed from the Risorgimento wars through the two world conflicts.

Context and history

The museum's history is a story of two collectors. After Battisti's death, Ebranati continued the work alone for forty years; it was he who in 1949 gave the collection its home in Salò and dedicated it to his friend. In 1976, on the initiative of General Cataldo Mancuso, president of the Brescian federation of the Institute, the Fondazione Museo Storico del Nastro Azzurro was established, recognised as a legal entity in 1981 by President Sandro Pertini; the foundation remains the owner and administrator of the collections. Their transfer on deposit to the Santa Giustina complex, where Mu.Sa. opened in 2015, placed the memorial beside the civic collections and the town's documentation of the Republic of Salò, creating an unusually complete spectrum of memory in one building. The foundation's work of conservation and remembrance continues alongside the display, keeping the museum a place of living devotion rather than a static shrine.