Museo Storico Novarese Aldo Rossini

On the Colle della Vittoria above Novara, the Museo Storico Novarese Aldo Rossini keeps the memory of the Novarese at war: a garden of memorials, an armoury spanning from the Battle of Novara to the Second World War, and an archive of documents and correspondence from local fighters, run by volunteers.

Why it matters

Novara's wars are usually remembered in monuments — the Memoriale alla Resistenza, the column of the Battle of Novara — but this museum preserves their human documentation. Founded in 1965 by the lawyer and senator Aldo Rossini with donations from public bodies and private citizens across the province, it fell into decline after his death and was rescued in 1995 by volunteers from the Novarese combatant and veteran associations, who still run it. Its five sectors move from commemoration to evidence: a garden of war memorials honouring the fallen of the army, navy and air force; an atrium dedicated to the founder, with a painting of a First World War infantryman by Walter Molino; a main hall of testimonies from famous and unknown fighters of the Novarese; an armoury of edged weapons and firearms; and an archive of military books, periodicals, photographs, personal documents and letters. The setting on the Viale della Rimembranza, the memorial avenue of the Colle della Vittoria, makes the museum and its garden a single commemorative landscape.

What to notice

The garden displays vehicles and military memorabilia among the memorials. In the atrium, Walter Molino's painting of a Great War infantryman introduces the founder's intent: the individual soldier, not the campaign map. The main hall arranges its material chronologically, and the strength of the display is its mix of the celebrated and the anonymous: documents and objects belonging to named figures of Novarese history sit beside the testimonials of unknown conscripts, so the local experience of both world wars reads as a social document rather than a shrine. The armoury holds edged and firearms from the period of the Battle of Novara (1849) through the Second World War, documenting changes in military technology and conscription across a century. The archive's correspondence and photographs of Novarese fighters include personal letters that document wartime experience; the collection also serves families and scholars conducting research.

Context and history

The museum belongs to the commemorative district that Novara created on the Colle della Vittoria, the hillock on the city's eastern side laid out with the Viale della Rimembranza and its memorial avenues in the interwar period. Aldo Rossini, a lawyer and senator whose generation had lived through both world wars, gathered the museum's founding collections in 1965 by appealing to institutions and families across the province; such civic war-museums were common in that decade, but few survived their founders. This one did, thanks to the 1995 recovery by the combatant associations' volunteers, who reopened it and continue to guide visitors, staff the archive and organise school programmes. Its collections therefore carry a double history: the wars they document, and the post-war civic effort — first Rossini's, then the volunteers' — to keep that documentation public. The museum operates today as a civic institution of the Comune di Novara, sustained by association volunteers, with support from association volunteers.