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Vittorio Emanuele Monument
Everything pales into insignificance beside this marble monstrosity - the Vittorio Emanuele Monument or “Vittoriano”, erected at the turn of the century as the “Altar of the Nation” to commemorate Italian Unification. Variously likened in the past to a typewriter (because of its shape), and, by American GIs, to a wedding block (the marble used will never mellow with age), King Vittorio Emanuele II, who it’s in part supposed to honour, probably wouldn’t have thought much of it - he was by all accounts a modest man; indeed, the only mortal who seems to have benefited from the building is the prime minister at the time, who was (perhaps not entirely coincidentally) a deputy for Brescia, from where the marble was supplied. At the top of the stairs is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, flanked by eternal flames and a permanent guard of honour. Incidentally, the equestrian statue of the king here is claimed to be the world’s largest (its moustache is apparently 3m long) - though perhaps the greatest irony is that all this memorializes a royal dynasty that produced just four monarchs.
