Monumento ai Caduti — Boifava’s War Memorial in Piazza Ferrari, Rimini (1926)

History

In 1922 a committee of Rimini citizens — the municipality’s history notes that it was made up in large part of widows and orphans — invited Italian artists to submit designs for “a figurative monument in bronze and stone to be raised in the middle of the Ferrari Gardens”. The brief asked for a work of considerable height, and, given the width of the square, a mass that was not slender. Its purpose was set out in one line: to glorify the memory of those who had fallen in the war.

The first stone was laid on 4 November 1922, Victory Day, together with the award of war crosses to the families of the dead. Inside it was placed a parchment: “On 4 November 1922 the citizens of Rimini solemnly laid this stone, that it might be the base of the monument in which the heroic sacrifice of the dead may beat with the memory of the living.” A procession of at least twelve thousand people reached Piazza Ferrari, where the eighty-voice choir of the Amintore Galli choral society was waiting to sing.

On 11 March 1923 the jury — the sculptor Ercole Drei, the architect Gaetano Nave and the engineer Sesto Baccarini — chose Bernardino Boifava’s design from three finalists. Boifava was a peasant’s son from Ghedi near Brescia who had learned his trade in a local workshop, then at the Moretto school of arts and crafts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence; called up at twenty-seven for the war, he had settled in Forlì, which he came to call his second home. In the years after the armistice he became one of the busiest makers of war memorials in Romagna.

Three more years passed before the monument stood. Costs were high, and the design ran into moral objections once it was shown to the public in a special issue of the review L’Ara in May 1924. A year later the Roman press took it up; the church authorities let it be known that, under ecclesiastical rules on images offending public decency, the blessing could not be given as things stood. What was actually changed was almost nothing: comparing the winning sketch with the finished bronze, the municipality’s history finds only one substantial difference, a broad leaf added over the hero’s groin. It is still there.

On 11 September 1926 King Victor Emmanuel III came to Rimini for the unveiling, and for the votive chapel to the fallen in the Tempio Malatestiano, painted by Francesco Brici. At four in the afternoon he left the town hall for Piazza Ferrari, where a company of the 27th Infantry Regiment was drawn up with its colours. The Bishop of Rimini blessed the monument; three bugle calls sounded; and the tricolour that wrapped the Hero slid down and spread over the granite base. Italo Balbo made the speech. The mayor then presented the sculptor to the king, who congratulated him and asked him how the work had been made.

Much later Federico Fellini put the monument into Amarcord, transfigured by memory. The gardens around it have changed twice since: the arrangement Boifava designed for — bronze against a background of trees — gave way in the 1980s to a paved square and the building that now covers the Roman house known as the Domus del Chirurgo.