The Shrine and the Square. Architectures for the myth of martyrdom, from the political cult to the post-ideological era

The commemorations of the centenary of the Great War marked the start of a series of projects to restore the great military shrines in north-eastern Italy. At Redipuglia, in front of the great monument containing the remains of one hundred thousand soldiers, a new permanent installation defines a field, the Campo delle Pietre d'Italia, which is both a square and a geometric address for the directing force of the shrine. The contemporary intervention becomes an opportunity to rethink the meaning that nowadays can be given to a particular kind of sacrifice for modern man, which is the sacrifice for motherland (Kantorowicz, 1951). The Military Shrine of Redipuglia was built between 1935 and 1938 according to the project of Giovanni Greppi and Giannino Castiglioni and testifies the regime's clear de-sire to appropriate the cult of the Great War as the heroic motif underlying the Fascist revolution (Dogliani, 1996). The tomb takes on the geographical dimension of the war theatre, transforming a big portion of Monte Sei Busi into a monumental staircase. The huge mineral mass, an allegory of the martyred army, moves inexorably towards the top of the hill, where three bronze crosses transfigure the ancient war grounds into the Chris-tian Golgotha. Time has slowly - even if not totally yet - deprived the monument of any rhetorical-celebratory impetus for the cult of sacrifice, and historical memory has consolidated more intimate forms of ritual. The Sacrarium can now show its ambivalent character, suspended between the expressive power of universal elements of architecture and the need to find firm roots in the landscapes of the Karst. On one hand, the painful memory transcends the place through forms of absolute symbolism, but at the same time the memory is renewed through an inseparable contextual link, in a mixture of drama and pathos. At the foot of the Military Shrine, in the new square built with triangular stones coming from all the quarries in Italy, "the apparent orderly disorder of the stone tapestry, in its extreme fragmentation, suggests the accumulation, the work of bodies that the war con-fined in the narrowness of the trenches" (Greco, 2018). During night, this stone carpet lets a tenuous captive light shine through its leaks, trans-forming it into a lamp lit in memory of the lost generation. The project, coordinated by Orazio Carpenzano, activates a dialectical comparison be-tween the physical dimension of matter and the ritual dimension of catharsis and re-membrance. This architecture for memory, now devoid of the propaganda related to its construction, speaks to the present of the sacrifice of an entire generation, and in its homage of the fallen finds a way to celebrate the sacredness and unity of the homeland.