Discover Sacrario Militare del Monte Grappa

The design is monumental and severe. Five concentric terraces climb the summit in rings, each faced with burial niches, rising to a small chapel of the Madonnina at the top -- the shape reads as an amphitheatre or a ziggurat rather than a cemetery.

The Via Eroica, a broad paved way lined with stones named for the contested peaks, connects the Italian ossuary to the Austro-Hungarian one. That the two are joined at all, and treated with the same architecture, is the most striking decision in the whole scheme.

It is a work of the 1930s and looks it -- the rhetoric of the period is unmistakable in the scale and the axial planning. That does not make it less effective, but it is worth reading as a monument of its own decade as well as a memorial to the previous one.