The “Pyramid of the Italians”

The cult of the “Fallen” was an essential part of Fascist mysticism. Those who died in battle were “an eternal example of valor, sacrifice, and heroism” for the new generations and a guarantee of the continuity of the nation, understood as a community in the past. From the outset, Mussolini’s regime undertook a campaign of mass monumentalizing, building huge cemeteries and “memory” monuments that praised World War I or the wars of Fascism. In addition, after the defeat at Guadalajara, the long lists of those killed in Spain could no longer be hidden, and it became necessary to celebrate them publicly by means of collective rituals that aestheticized grief and turned it into a spectacle.

When the Civil War was over, a patrol called the Onoranze Caduti (Honoured Fallen) led by chaplain Pietro da Varzi was charged with recovering the remains of of Italian soldiers buried in civil and military cemeteries across Spain and transferring them to the Italian Military Sanctuary which, along with the Saint Anthony of Padua Church, was built in Zaragoza in 1942, on a design by Víctor Eusa, an architect from Navarre. There was also a headstone remembering “the 4.183 Italians who die don Spanish soil in the war of 1936 to 1939”. The names of the anti-Fascist fighters who died were added in 1945.

In the 1950s, some were moved to the Valley of the Fallen and another 384 were put in a monument built in Puerto del Escudo (Burgos) 1939. Designed by Attlio Radic, the stepped-pyramid structure reproduces an “M”, the first letter in Mussolini’s surname. It was inaugurated in the summer of 1939, the second anniversary of the Santander offensive, and was visited by Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano.

In May 1971, a bus carrying Italian families who were visiting the monument was involved in an accident that killed twelve people. In 1975, the government of Italy decided to exhume the bodies: 268 were repatriated and the rest were transferred to the Military Sanctuary in Zaragoza.

Historical memory associations have repeatedly requested that the so-called “pyramid of the Italians” be demolished, but in February 2024, the regional government of Castilla-Leon, controlled by a coalition of the Popular party and the extreme right party VOX, declared it an Object of Cultural Interest to prevent this. There has been no effort to re-signify the monument, nor to provide any interpretation or to locate it in the historical context of Fascist aggression against the Spanish Republic. For the time being, it remains as another landmark for those nostalgic for Fascism and the Franco regime.

FJMS