Museo Garibaldino e della Grande Guerra

Inside a former washhouse on the Assat stream, Bezzecca's two-floor museum pairs the Risorgimento with the world wars: a scale model of the 1866 battle fought here by Garibaldi's volunteers, uniforms and rifles, a Schwarzlose machine gun, and testimony of the valley's wartime exodus. The hillside above holds the ossuary church and trenches.

Why it matters

Bezzecca gives its name to a battle that decided nothing strategically and everything symbolically: on 21 July 1866, during the Third War of Independence, Garibaldi's volunteers defeated an Austrian force here in the Trentino campaign. The museum brings together the valley's Risorgimento history, First World War front line and the civilian exodus that followed. The ossuary church and Italian trenches remain part of the surrounding historical landscape.

What to notice

The ground floor is the Risorgimento room. Its centrepiece is a scale model of the battle of Bezzecca, surrounded by Garibaldine uniforms, rifles, documents, maps and proclamations, with a bust of Giuseppe Garibaldi presiding. The first floor presents the twentieth century: ordnance of various calibres, a Schwarzlose machine gun, and a folding Bianchi bicycle of the kind used by the cyclists' bersaglieri battalion, donated in the 1920s. Records of the valley population’s deportation to Bohemia during the First World War preserve an experience that reshaped the valley as deeply as the fighting itself. The model's setting is echoed on the hillside above, where the ossuary church and Italian trenches preserve the landscape of the fighting.

Context and history

The battle of 21 July 1866 was the high point of Garibaldi's last campaign; when the armistice ordered him to give up the Trentino, his one-word reply telegraphed from Bezzecca on 9 August — "Obbedisco", I obey — became one of the Risorgimento's most quoted documents, studied down to the question of whether the surviving telegram bears his own signature. Half a century later the valley was again a front line, and its population was exiled en masse. After the war the church on the Colle di Santo Stefano received the fallen of both 1866 and the Great War as an ossuary under the patronage of the Ministry of Defence. Memory work became institutional with the founding of the Parco Museo Bezzecca 1866 in December 2004.