Cast at the Fonderia Bragadin and paid for by the parishioners of Santa Maria del Carmelo themselves, this flagpole monument has stood in Campo Santa Margherita since 4 November 1925, naming the dead of a single Venetian parish rather than the city as a whole.
At a glance
A marble-based bronze pilo — a Venetian ceremonial flagpole base — stands in Campo Santa Margherita bearing the names of the parish of Santa Maria del Carmelo’s own fallen of the First World War (1915–1918). Its inscription records that the parishioners themselves commissioned it, and it was inaugurated on 4 November 1925, the anniversary of the Italian victory that ended the war on its own front.
Key facts
- Type: pilo (ceremonial flagpole base) doubling as a war memorial
- Commissioned by: the parishioners of Santa Maria del Carmelo (I Carmini)
- Inaugurated: 4 November 1925
- Foundry: Fonderia Bragadin, cast in bronze
- Inscription: “Qui dove vissero la patria maternamente, ad uno ad uno ricorda e chiama i morti per lei e insieme li confida alla gloria” (“Here, where they lived the homeland as a mother, she remembers and calls, one by one, the dead who died for her, and commends them together to glory”)
- Also inscribed: the names of the parish’s war dead, on the base
A parish’s own memorial, not the city’s
Most of Venice’s public war memorials were raised by the municipality or the state; this one belongs instead to a single parish, Santa Maria del Carmelo, whose parishioners paid for and dedicated it themselves in the years immediately following the war. Its form — a bronze figural group crowning a marble pilo, one of the traditional flagpole bases found across Venice’s squares — adapts a familiar civic object into a place of local mourning and remembrance, naming the campo’s own dead rather than the war’s dead in the abstract.
Getting there
The monument stands in Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro, near the church of the Carmini.
Sources
- On-site inscription, photographed at the monument, giving the dedication text, the parish, the 4 November 1925 date and the “Fonderia Bragadin” foundry mark.
- Stefano Vigolo, who photographed the monument.
Photo gallery
Photograph contributed by a Cultural Heritage Online member.
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See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Stefano Vigolo for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
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