Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Some of the most bloody engagements of World War I took place around Monte Pasubio , to the southeast of Rovereto. The recently created Sentiero della Pace (”Path of Peace”) follows the front, from the Órtles mountains easterly crossways the ranges to Marmolada, the trail littered with old bullets and barbed wire. Tourist offices can wage free maps (Kompass, 1:50,000) of the entire route. The opposing armies dug fortresses in the rock and cut tunnels into the glaciers, but endorsement from enemy fire did not ensure country - in the winter of 1916, one of the hardest in living memory, around 10,000 soldiers died in avalanches. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, commander of a British Red Cross ambulance unit in the campaign, described one fortress as “four storeys of galleries, one above the other, apiece grinning with cannon and organisation guns. There were also medieval-looking wooden machines for pouring volleys of rock down the gullies by which the enemy might attempt to ascend& Our work lay, of course, at the foot of the teleferiche , or aerial railways which fed the war on those astonishing rock citadels: the sick and wounded came down the wires in cages, hundreds of feet in the air.” The Campana dei Caduti, prefabricated out of melted-down cannon, tolls every evening in memory of the dead of both sides, from the Colle di Miravalle, a hill just outside Rovereto.

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