Monumento ai Caduti (Fante crociato)

In Casale Monferrato's public gardens stands the Monumento ai Caduti by the city's own sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi. At its centre a mud-caked foot soldier presses his bayonet to his chest like a cross — the Fante crociato — while Primavera Italica steps toward the future. Inaugurated by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1928.

Why it matters

Casale lost a generation in the First World War, and the memorial it raised became the great monument of its public gardens, described in the national catalogue as an allegory of the Fatherland. Bistolfi, born in Casale in 1859 and the leading Italian symbolist sculptor, worked on the memorial for years and considered the figure of the foot soldier a sudden, almost visionary inspiration — he wrote that he saw the soldier before him one night and believed God had guided his hands. The result is unusual among war memorials: not triumph but transfigured suffering, the bayonet reframed as a cross, the whole composition held in a marble exedra whose frieze carries verses by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Because Bistolfi was Casalese, the monument also closes a local circle — the same sculptor whose plaster casts fill the city's gipsoteca designed the memorial his fellow-citizens walk past daily.

What to notice

The semicircular platform measures about ten and a half metres in diameter and rises on a plinth. The marble exedra is carried by four caryatids in the form of winged victories, and the frieze above bears the D'Annunzian inscription invoking the "new Italic spring". On the top step stands the Fante crociato himself — a leaning infantryman in a huge greatcoat, bayonet at his chest, his face meant to hold grief and heroism transfigured — a bronze about two metres high. At the left, on the lower step, the second bronze moves outward: a lightly robed woman bearing flowers, known as Primavera Italica, stepping down from the platform and out of the ensemble, the image of the country's rebirth answering the soldier's sacrifice. The two figures never meet; together they stage memory and renewal.

Context and history

Bistolfi designed many war memorials after 1918, but for Casale he asked something different of the genre: he chose the quiet of the public gardens over a busy square, calling the memorial an altar to be reached, in his own words, "on pious pilgrimage". Bistolfi described the infantryman as a figure shaped by the mud and suffering of the trenches, with the bayonet held to his breast as a cross rather than a sword. The monument was erected in the public gardens of the city and inaugurated on 26 May 1928 in the presence of King Victor Emmanuel III, the same year that saw Bistolfi complete major monuments to Carducci in Bologna and Garibaldi in Savona. The monument combines bronze, white marble and stone.