Mausoleo Ossario Garibaldino

Between the spring and summer of 1849, the French troops sent by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III) laid siege to the city in order to restore papal temporal power by force of arms and to depose the Repubblica Romana. This was a short-lived republican government, which had been declared a few months earlier following the great revolutionary uprisings that had inflamed a large part of Europe in 1848. In the desperate defense of Rome led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, Porta San Pancrazio and the Janiculum Hill played a key role due to their strategic position.

After the Breach of Porta Pia, the need was felt to commemorate the sacrifice of all those who had fought to complete the unification of the Italian peninsula. Giuseppe Garibaldi and his son Menotti were among the promoters of the law that decreed the Janiculum as a place of remembrance. In 1879, a first simple burial ground was therefore created, with a plaque placed on the wall next to the church of San Pietro in Montorio. Many bodies of revolutionaries and fighters (buried until then at the Verano, at the battle sites near the Aurelian Walls, at Villa Borghese, at the Giustiniana and in some vineyards between San Pancrazio and Porta Maggiore) were gathered here. The monument currently visible, with its snow-white structure immersed in the greenery of the hill, dates back to the years of the fascist regime. It was Ezio Garibaldi, the then president of the “Società dei Reduci Patrie Battaglie” named after his grandfather, who proposed its construction to the government, which agreed, bearing the costs.

Designed by architect Giovanni Jacobucci, the Ossuary Mausoleum was solemnly inaugurated on 3 November 1941 after two years of work. An austere four-sided travertine portico with three round arches on each side encloses an altar carved from a single block of red granite, embellished with allegorical figures inspired by Roman antiquity, including the Capitoline she-wolf, the imperial eagle, shields, insignia and gladii. These motifs are repeated throughout the decorative apparatus of the Mausoleum. At the corners of the portico, four travertine pedestals support bronze braziers decorated with she-wolf heads, which are still lit on official occasions. The pedestals commemorates the most significant battles for the liberation of Rome, while the attic of the main façade bears the engraved inscription “Ai caduti per Roma 1849-1870”, “To the fallen for Rome 1849-1870”, and the motto “Roma o morte”, “Rome or death”.

At the back of the portico, a double flight of stairs descends to the shrine crypt destined to remember the names and house the remains of those who fell in the battles for Rome, from the dramatic days of the siege of the city in 1849 to the Breach of Porta Pia in 1870. Along the walls covered in polychrome marble are 36 tombs enclosed by plaques commemorating the names of over 1,600 patriots, including Angelo Brunetti (better known as Ciceruacchio), Enrico Dandolo, Luciano Manara, Emilio Morosini, Giuditta Tavani Arquati and Colomba Antonietti Porzi. In the center of the crypt a porphyry sarcophagus contains the remains of Goffredo Mameli, the young poet author of the Hymn of Italy, who was mortally wounded on the Janiculum Hill in 1849 at the age of only 22.