Piazza della Vittoria

A monument to the First World War dead gives Piazza della Vittoria its gravity: bronze soldiers, a trireme and the goddess Athena crowning a stone pedestal at the centre of the great rectangle that opens the Borgo onto Via D'Aquino.

Why it matters

Taranto built several kinds of monument in the twentieth century, but this is the one it argued about longest. The commemorative complex at the centre of the square took from the first sketches to full completion more than three decades, and the municipal portal warns visitors that its story is genuinely complicated. Reading it explains not only the war dead it honours but the self-image of an arsenal city: the Latin inscription on the base — Ex Rostris, ad Gloriam, Italica Virtus — turns naval rostra into a claim about Italian valour, while a second inscription closes with the words Taranto Madre and the date IV Novembre MCMXXX.

The square itself matters as urban design. This is where the Borgo's principal street, Via D'Aquino, widens into a formal space, and the memorial was positioned to close the view for anyone walking the quarter's main promenade.

What to notice

Taranto artist Francesco Paolo Como (1888–1973), winner of a national competition, designed the sculptural programme. On the side facing Corso Umberto, two soldiers carry a wounded comrade beneath the figure of Victory. The upper group, called the Aquilifero and dedicated to the Navy, includes a Roman trireme, a soldier hurling an eagle and Athena above the soldiers. A chamber at the base, closed by wrought-iron doors, has mosaics designed by Como.

Context and history

The sequence is instructive. A first project came from Cesare Bazzani, the Roman architect behind several of the era's official buildings in Taranto; the portal dates his scheme to 1919, the year a citizens' committee had begun to organise the homage. Financial difficulties and revisions slowed everything, and the monument was finally inaugurated in November 1930 in the presence of King Vittorio Emanuele III — still incomplete, as the portal stresses.

The setting is part of the meaning. Via D'Aquino, the street the square commands, had been known as Strada del Carmine and received its present name in 1892 in honour of Tommaso Nicolò d'Aquino, the Arcadian poet whose Latin verses celebrated Taranto. A memorial to industrial-age war thus planted itself at the head of a promenade conceived for a poet's city — and the monument's mixture of classical rhetoric and modern grief records exactly that passage.