A monument dedicated to the Romanian WWI fallen soldiers buried in Italy was unveiled on Monday at the Bolzano Military Cemetery in the presence of Romanian and Italian Defense Ministers Vasile Dîncu and Lorenzo Guerini, of Romanian ambassador to Italy Gabriela Dancău, and the heads of the two Defense Ministries’ central structures, the National Defense Ministry said in a release.
During the ceremony, the military brass band and a detachment of the „Mihai Viteazul” 30th Guard Brigade gave the salute, and a group of Romanian military priests performed the service for the consecration of the monument and in remembrance of the fallen.
The two Ministers laid wreaths in memory of the Romanian and Italian heroes buried in this cemetery.
„We have a duty to keep the memory of these sacrifices alive and to make sure that such tragic events never happen again. This is not just a ceremony evoking the past and the troops’ selfless service, but a testament to the fact that the legacy left to us by the heroes of those times must be respected and passed down intact to the future generations”, Minister Dîncu said during the ceremony.
The Romanian war memorial located in Italy was built as part of a construction project carried out in 2021 by the National Defense Ministry through its National Heroes Office, with the support of the Italian Defense Ministry, through the General Commissariat for Honors to the War Fallen.
The memorial is made of a single-block of marble and represents, in an artistic manner, the Latin cross. In the central part it features a bas-relief remembrance sign and lettering reading „Aducerii Aminte” (Remembrance), as well as the years „1916 – 1919”, and „In memory of the Romanian heroes killed in Bolzano” (in Romanian and Italian) and „National Heroes Office – 2021” (in Romanian).
The memorial is part of a series of projects and activities initiated by Romania to mark the Centennial of the First World War, designed to keep alive in public consciousness, both nationally and externally, the memory of the sacrifice of the Romanian military in WWI, also known as the War for the Unification of the Nation.
Of the 1,189 Romanian WWI fallen soldiers identified based on archive documents who are buried in Italy, 55 are buried in Bolzano.
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