Monumento ai Caduti del Passetto

At the seaward end of the Viale della Vittoria, a ring of Istrian stone columns stands on the Passetto promontory, engraved with verses of Leopardi. Ancona's Monumento ai Caduti is a First World War memorial on the Passetto promontory above the Adriatic, near the city's painted sea caves.

Why it matters

The city's official heritage itinerary ranks the memorial among the handful of places that stand for Ancona, designed by the Ancona-born architect Guido Cirilli and built between 1927 and 1930 to close the perspective of the Viale della Vittoria with a circular composition on a high base. Eight columns of Istrian stone carry an architrave incised with lines from Giacomo Leopardi's patriotic song All'Italia, and at the centre of the colonnade a great altar forms the symbolic heart of the space — a fusion of classical form, civic grief and national poetry that could hardly be more concentrated.

The position is part of the meaning. The monument looks over the open Adriatic from the edge of the promontory, and seen from the shore below, the tourism portal notes, its colonnade and side stairways compose the celebrated silhouette of an eagle with spread wings. It is a focal point of the city's commemorative life.

What to notice

The memorial closes the long green axis of Viale della Vittoria. Its circular composition includes columns, an architrave and a central altar on an elevated base. The carved Leopardi lines deserve a slow reading — the choice of All'Italia ties the fallen of the Great War to the poet who gave the Risorgimento its voice.

From the shore below, the colonnade and side stairways form the celebrated silhouette of an eagle with spread wings. Below extends the world of the Grotte del Passetto — more than five hundred caves dug into the cliff from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s, originally as shelters for small fishing boats, their brightly painted wooden doors one of the most photogenic sights on the Adriatic. The grottaroli, or cave keepers, have shaped the shore's cultural history.

Context and history

The memorial belongs to the transformation of Ancona between the wars. The Viale della Vittoria itself, the city's ATRIUM itinerary explains, was traced according to the 1914 master plan and consolidated through the 1920s and 1930s as a grand tree-lined axis linking the historic centre to the Passetto promontory; the monument was conceived as its terminal, crowning the cliff where the avenue meets the sea. Ancona participates in the Council of Europe-certified ATRIUM cultural route on the architecture of twentieth-century regimes, and the itinerary presents this heritage with a critical, memory-oriented reading rather than celebration.

The caves below tell the other half of the story. Dug by hand over roughly a century as private boat shelters, they grew into a spontaneous architectural landscape of hoists, slipways and salvaged materials — railway sleepers as launch supports, reclaimed tiles for floors, furniture repainted from city houses — which the tourism portal describes as a rare example of spontaneous architecture in harmony with a natural setting, and an immense cultural and environmental patrimony.