History

The Montello is a low, elongated hill running roughly east–west along the northern bank of the Piave between Nervesa and Montebelluna. Its wooded slopes and commanding views made it a key terrain feature from the moment the Italian front stabilised along the Piave after Caporetto in late 1917. For seven months, Austrian forces held the eastern approaches while Italian units fortified the hill’s western and southern faces.

The critical test came on 15 June 1918, when Austro-Hungarian forces launched the offensive that Italians call the Battaglia del Solstizio — the Battle of the Solstice. The Montello was among the primary objectives. Austro-Hungarian troops crossed the Piave and managed to seize roughly half of the hill in the first hours of the assault. General Pennella’s forces and the 22nd Army Corps under General Vaccari counterattacked persistently over the following days. By 20 June the Austrians had been pushed back to the river; by 22 June, Boroevic’s armies had re-crossed to the eastern bank. Austrian losses across the entire front ran to approximately 150,000 casualties. The Italian Army had held.

The town of Nervesa had been occupied and heavily damaged during these battles. When reconstruction and renaming took place after the armistice, the municipality formally adopted “della Battaglia” — a permanent marker in the town’s legal name of what the landscape recorded in blood. Four months after the June battle, the Battle of Vittorio Veneto (24 October – 3 November 1918) concluded the war on the Italian Front, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire signing an armistice on 3 November 1918.

The sacrario was designed in the early 1930s and completed in 1935, though it was formally inaugurated in 1938 on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of the Solstizio. The remains interred here came from 120 field cemeteries spread along the middle Piave, gathered over years of exhumation work conducted by the Commissariato Generale per le Onoranze ai Caduti in Guerra.