Monumento ai Caduti

On Laglio's shore road stands a First World War memorial with unusually good documentation: a bronze allegory of Italy, over three metres tall, cast in Milan and raised in 1922 on a granite pedestal. The state heritage catalogue records the work under Michele Vedani's name, and the municipal portal preserves the commission's paperwork story.

Why it matters

Many lake villages put up war memorials in the 1920s; few can show the paper trail of theirs. Laglio’s comune signed the commission contract on 1 March 1922. A lottery and public subscriptions helped fund the bronze, cast at the Battaglia Pogliani Frigerio e Vecchi foundry in Milan and installed by November that year. The sculptor was the Milanese artist Michele Vedani, a pupil of Enrico Butti at the Brera Academy, better known for small sculptures, funerary works and public bronzes. The monument is attributed to Vedani and dated 1922.

The bronze itself is a measured piece of post-war allegory rather than triumphalism, which is the second reason to look closely.

What to notice

• The bronze depicts Italy as a woman resting a sword on the ground with her left hand and raising a Roman standard bearing SPQR with her right. A winged Victory offers a laurel crown to the fallen. Victory and peace, defeat's cost and duty's honour, held together in one gesture.
• The front inscription, "Morirono per la Patria", is followed by the names, ranks and death dates of Laglio’s fallen from 1915 through 1918.
• The making: the figure stands over three metres tall and, per the portal, weighs 545 kg; the pedestal is a tall, plain block of grey granite, so the bronze carries the whole expressive load.
• The modelling: critics cited by the portal note the twisting stance and short wind-blown dress of the figure — heroic emphasis achieved through movement, an echo, not a copy, of the energy of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

Context and history

The memorial belongs to the great wave of commemoration that followed the First World War, when every Italian comune, however small, had to give its dead a public presence. Laglio's solution was to engage a Brera-trained sculptor of established reputation: Vedani, born in Milan in the 1870s (sources differ between 1874 and 1879; the state catalogue uses 1874) and active until 1969, had already made funerary and public works, and would go on to other war memorials in Lombardy. The contract of 1 March 1922, the lottery, the subscription and the Milanese foundry — Battaglia Pogliani Frigerio e Vecchi — reconstruct a civic effort typical of the moment: the monument as a collective act, paid for by the community in small shares, not by a single patron.

The critic Tiziana Rota, quoted by the portal, places the work within Vedani's oeuvre of public bronzes; a period photograph shows his teacher Enrico Butti in front of the finished Laglio monument, a small trace of the Brera lineage. The memorial still stands on the Via Regina Vecchia, the shore road, where the village passes it daily — its historic location.