Sacrario Militare del Monte Grappa Site Features

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.

The concentric terraces

Five rings of burial niches climbing to the summit chapel.

The Via Eroica

The paved way linking the Italian and Austro-Hungarian ossuaries, named for the peaks fought over.

The view

On a clear day the whole Veneto plain, the Dolomites, and occasionally the Adriatic.

The road up

Around 30 km of hairpins from Bassano, climbing 1,600 metres -- a serious drive and a famous cycling climb.

Monte Grappa is an isolated massif standing between the Brenta and Piave valleys, north of Bassano del Grappa. Its isolation is exactly what made it strategically decisive, and what makes the summit view so complete.