Fortress Monte Baldo: A Military Landscape Between Nature and War

Abstract

Monte Baldo, a mountain ridge located in Northeastern Italy between Lake Garda and the Adige River, is a unique geohistorical location linking the Germanic world and the Mediterranean area. It exhibits the typical characteristics of a military landscape and has done so since the beginning of the eighteenth century continuing through the Second World War. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to unfold the natural landscape of Monte Baldo into a new perspective and (2) to reconfigure Monte Baldo as a military landscape where signs of its military history are clearly marked.

1 Introduction

Monte Baldo, the southernmost mountain group in the pre-Alps, rises to a height of 2218 m and stands northwest of the city of Verona (Fig. 4.1). A long, serrated ridge, it is bounded by Lake Garda to the west, the Val Lagarina (the southern end of the Val d’Adige) to the east and the Loppio Valley to the north. To the south, it is bounded by the area extending from the southern end of Lake Garda to the Caprino Plain and to the Morainic Amphitheatre of Rivoli Veronese (Figs. 4.2 and 4.3). Projecting southward, uniquely in the Alps, Monte Baldo forms an asymmetrical bastion, steeply sloping on the western side, whereas the eastern side is divided into a system of ridges, valleys, plateaus and natural terraces. These have favoured human settlement in the heart of Monte Baldo since ancient times (Turri 1998; Villa 2010).

Fig. 4.1

Monte Baldo (northeast Italy) and its physical boundaries

Fig. 4.2

The southern sector of Monte Baldo with places mentioned in this paper

Fig. 4.3

The northern sector of Monte Baldo with places mentioned in this paper

Because of these very different environments, Monte Baldo has two aspects, a natural space that is still wild and an area shaped by humans. It is imprinted with many marks of history, some of which are more obvious than others. Whereas its special natural features have attracted scholars to Monte Baldo since the sixteenth century,¹ in modern times, the mountain itself has become an object of interest, especially as a border area and link between the northern European and Mediterranean worlds. Over the centuries, this location on the boundary would progressively endow it with the features and characteristics of a military landscape, with traces going back to ancient times.

We can define a military landscape as one formed by the build-up and superimposition of traces of military activity over the medium and long term. These traces may be real, such as physical or documented remains, but can also be intangible, such as testimonies of those engaged in military activities in the area. These testimonies are primarily by soldiers but are also by civilians who suffered war in various ways and describe their experiences from their various and differing points of view. A military landscape should be considered a cultural landscape in that it incorporates ‘minor but morphologically and visually important functional elements’ (Pinchemel and Pinchemel 1996, p. 37) having a specific place in the history of an area (Woodward 2004, 2005, 2014a, b). The particular attention to the relationship of diverse observers with the territory and to testimonies that are different by nature, age and origin as well as the integration and overlap between written, photographic and cartographic sources strengthen even more the role of the above-mentioned functional elements in the landscape. Thus, the interaction of material traces in an area, perceptions, narratives, military cartography and official documents will help us more effectively delineate the military landscape of Monte Baldo.

2 A Mountain on the Limes Veneticus

There are, in the area of Monte Baldo, ancient, ephemeral, but noteworthy, traces of minor but important functional elements that hold a particular role in the history of the region. These can be seen both as an unavoidable route for those who attempted to cross the heights of Monte Baldo and as the impassable route alongside the Ossi Valley. ‘Bones Valley’ (ossi is the Italian word for bones) is a craggy and detrital area on the western side of Monte Baldo, often mentioned by its first visitors, the sixteenth-century botanists.

Venetian historian Marin Sanudo, who wrote about this area in 1483 (his chronicle was published much later, however, in 1847), suggested an attractive explanation for this by establishing a link between the place names and the episodes of fighting which had actually taken place in more than one part of the Monte Baldo area over the centuries. So, if as early as the fifteenth-century people were assuming that Monte Baldo had been the scene of terrible battles, this needs to be followed up and investigated more thoroughly to see how the military role of the mountain arose and was shaped over time.

The starting point is the so-called Almagià map , a fifteenth-century document that has recently provoked a heated argument among scholars over its standing as a military map (ASVe 1438). This status is confirmed above all by the accuracy and care with which aspects, such as routes and castles, were depicted together with references to place names relating to strategic sites (e.g. La Corona, San Marco and Corvara). These would become symbols of the military landscape of Monte Baldo over the centuries (Varanini et al. 2014).

However that may be Monte Baldo’s military connotations relate to its special features as a border area in the pre-Alps, originating in the nature and form of its particular physical relief, shaped by mountains and rivers. It is a kind of hinge between two different geopolitical realities that have led to the formation and development of a major, although imaginary, border wall across its slopes and along its ridges. It is a substantial, almost real, wall, despite rare physical demarcation between transalpine and Mediterranean civilisations, in an area inviting friction and conflict.

The imaginary frontier wall on Monte Baldo, which probably already existed as a limes (limit or boundary) in Roman times, was consolidated in the fifteenth century when the dominions of the Scaligeri family expanded into the Val d’Adige and the surrounding mountains. This is evidenced by the border line ‘that runs across Monte Baldo and the Lagarina valley, starting at the top of the Altissimo di Nago and ending on Monte Sparavieri in Lessinia’ (Zumiani 2011, p. 9), almost coinciding with the present boundary between Veneto and Trentino-Alto Adige. However, in the centuries immediately following, with the border lines already established, Monte Baldo also inherited their inherent disputes. In an attempt to resolve these, prominent stone boundary markers were erected, on the assumption that they might resolve any additional disputes arising (Fig. 4.4).

Fig. 4.4

Stone boundary marker at Cerbiolo pass

This sense of a frontier wall, whose line has remained almost unchanged for a long time, can be understood with the help of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps of the area. The Topographiam veronensis agri (Topographic map of the Veronese region; IGMa 1625) shows the boundary in the Val d’Adige up to Borghetto, although only as a mere line, confirming the territorial division in the earliest of modern times. Some places frequently arising in the Monte Baldo military area, such as La Corona, Ferrara and Brentonego, are indicated by name. But it is above all on Tophografia della Frontiera del Veronese co’ gli Austriaci (Topographic map of the border between the Veronese region and Austria; ASVr 1713) that the borderline is clearly shown, with alongside it ‘two lines of posts, a first forward line, a second drawn back because of the snow’ (ASVr 1713, caption) marked in different colours designed to prevent smuggling, indicating the strategic localities shown on the fifteenth-century Almagià map: La Corona, San Marco and Corvara.

The early eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in the way that the Monte Baldo area was viewed and its landscape conceived; its importance as a border guard was confirmed. It is during this time that the mountain became, so to speak, decked with new manifestations of military activity that, together with its inherent qualities, its unchanging natural features such as the passes and man-made works such as roads and boundaries, helped to build its military character. For the Monte Baldo area, the century opened with the passage of ‘a column of the army of the Duke of Vendôme that descended on Brentonico after having burned down Ferrara’ (Gorfer 1993, p. 49) at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession.² At the outbreak of war in 1701, the French and Spanish troops commanded by French Marshal Nicolas de Catinat began military operations in the area to thwart the Habsburgs by preparing some entrenched positions on Monte Baldo. In 1703, troops of the Holy Roman Empire, commanded by Prince Eugene of Savoy, were lined up against the French and Spanish under the orders of the Duke of Vendôme who, in planning to occupy Trentino, intended to join up with the Bavarian troops who had occupied the Tyrol from the north. This is a time when Monte Baldo was regarded as a valuable access route from the south towards the Holy Roman Empire, especially through the natural gaps of the Cerbiolo, Cavallo and Colma di Novezza passes (Fig. 4.5) and the Campione pass.

Fig. 4.5

Cavallo di Novezza was a key point for the control of the routes, and not just during the War of Spanish Succession

Maps relating to the French invasion of Trentino in 1703 provide direct evidence of these events. In a letter to his sovereign, King Louis XIV, Vendôme sets out in some detail his intentions to proceed with the troops along both sides of Lake Garda, at the head of one of the two army corps:

[from Ferrara] I would if I could climb Monte Baldo, to take the fortifications that the enemies have made between this mountain and the Adige in the vicinity of Borghetto from behind. Your majesty will be able to see all this on the map that I have had the honour of sending you. If I succeed, I will then try to strike towards Torbole, to join up with the body that will have passed down the other side of the lake. (Bressan 1994, p. 205)

Unfortunately, loss of the map mentioned by Vendôme prevents us from reconstructing the proposed route and from locating the enemy fortifications between the Adige and Monte Baldo at Borghetto. However, another document (as yet unpublished) can help in this respect: the Carte de partie du Trentin & du Veronois dans la quelle sont Marquez les retranchemens faits par les Imperiaux dans la presente année 1703 au long de l’Adige tant en deça qu’en dela de cette Rivierre et a la partie Septentrionale des bords du Lac de Garde (Map of part of Trentino and Veronese in which are marked the entrenchments made by the Imperials in the present year 1703 along the Adige both below and beyond this River and in the northern part of the shores of Lake Garda; IGMb 1703). This map, which is full of information about the routes followed by the French forces and the positions of major defensive works in the Val d’Adige, is unfortunately of little help in locating fortifications in the area of the mountain. Although it clearly shows those in the valley bottoms between Avio and Borghetto and the upper lake between Riva and Torbole, there is no mention of fortifications at higher altitudes on the slopes of Monte Baldo. The border line, however, is clearly marked, together with the same place names relating to sites of military interest shown on the fifteenth-century Almagià map – La Ferrara, La Corona, La Croara, San Marco.

On conclusion of the Italian stage of the War of the Spanish Succession and as part of an ambitious project to redefine the border between the Austrian House of Habsburg and the Venetian Republic, the Congress of Rovereto in 1753 put an end to the long-standing border disputes, albeit with some difficulties with regard to some points of particular military importance, such as the passes. The result was a jagged boundary line, along which new boundary markers were placed to mark the defensive wall of Monte Baldo; this boundary line is well represented on the detailed 1790s Mappa dei confini tra il Trentino e il Veronese sul monte Baldo (Map of the border between Trentino and Veronese on Monte Baldo; ACAv 1790), now kept in the town hall of the village of Avio in Trentino.

These boundary markers are the same as those mentioned by French officer and geographer Jean Jacques Germain Pelet in 1803 in a report intended for the French Army, which has remained unpublished until recent times when it was discovered (Dal Corso and Salgaro 2004). This is a treatise on regional military geography, written before the term was coined. It is an essential reference for study of the military landscape of Monte Baldo at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Monte Baldo’s involvement in the 1796–1797 Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (led by General Napoleon Bonaparte), which can be followed in the 1803 account by Lieutenant Pelet, brought about the extensive use of the network of tracks for the passage of troops and a need to protect passes and borders with the construction of new fortifications. At stake was control of a mountain hinge, the key to the north-south corridors of the Adige and Lake Garda areas.

For Monte Baldo, the Napoleonic wars represented the beginning of a stormy historical period that would leave further traces, constructions and passages in the book of the military landscape that had been emerging for centuries. The geographical nature of the region would have decisive repercussions on the outcome of battles, and at the same time the countenance of the area would be marked by the presence and activity of troops, as attested by the Descrizione Geografica, Militare e Politica dell’Italia, di Napoleone Bonaparte reported by Martino Cellai (1864). Once again, the practicability of routes was a determining factor in the conduct of military operations on the slopes of the mountain, and it was these (virtually unchanged from previous centuries) which focused the first actions of the French against the Austrians in a place now known as a military icon because of its strategic importance – La Corona (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6

The Church of Madonna della Corona, a devotional temple and a military icon

Lieutenant Pelet refers to entrenchments built by French General Joubert at La Corona in January 1797. Joubert also placed outposts towards Monte Baldo and Ferrara before abandoning the position to regroup on the Rivoli Plain, where the situation definitively came under French control (Dal Corso and Salgaro 2004). In the armistice signed on 18 April 1797, the borders were redefined, and the Monte Baldo area was declared neutral territory. To re-emphasise the strategic importance of the Monte Baldo area in subsequent different geopolitical circumstances, it should not be forgotten that Bonaparte himself was aware of it; a document sanctioning the handing over of the Tyrol and Trentino from France to Bavaria signed in Innsbruck on 11 February 1806 states that ‘for military reasons Napoleon held onto the extreme lower end of the Trentino, the parishes of Ala, Avio and Brentonico, part of the district of Mori’ (Corsini 1963, p. 72).

3 A Static Front

In the course of the Risorgimento,³ Monte Baldo, defined by famous Italian, Nobel Prize poet Giosuè Carducci as ‘the father mountain’ (Carducci 1877, p. 40), continued and strengthened its strategic role and was once again the scene of clashes. The annexation of the Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 brought about a radical change, and the border that ran along the ridges and slopes of the mountain took on a new meaning and gave rise to the creation of an area that became progressively more militarised, conceptually and physically. This was partly due to new construction spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the Austrian forts Wohlgemuth, Hlavaty, Mollinary and Chiusa and the Italian forts San Marco, Cimo Grande and Naole (Fig. 4.7; see Premi 2015). The culmination came with the outbreak of the First World War, which also saw the front halt along this border line – it became a static front precisely because of the bulwark nature of Monte Baldo. However, despite this immobility, it was the First World War which left the most tangible and permanent marks of a military landscape on Monte Baldo.

Fig. 4.7

Remains of Fort Naole, with Monte Baldo ridge in the backwards

Awareness of the military role of Monte Baldo has therefore been a more or less constant companion to the history of its landscape, at least from the beginning of the Modern Age in the late fifteenth century. We can regard this awareness as implicit until the seventeenth century, explicit but not substantial between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and explicit and substantial from the early twentieth century, that is, when military geography began to be specifically discussed by high commands and in military academies.

Although reading about the area through the accounts of military engineers (primarily the 1803 document by Lieutenant Pelet) helps to foster understanding of the complexity of the landscape problems in the eighteenth century, to complete the definition of Monte Baldo as a military landscape, we must focus attention on another specific text, one unique of its kind. Exactly a century after Pelet, the periodical ‘Rivista Militare Italiana’ published an essay La regione del Baldo e dei Lessini. Descrizione geografico-militare (Prata 1903), a true work of military geography specifically relating to Monte Baldo. Written by Major Prata of the 65th Italian infantry regiment, the text is perhaps the first work on Monte Baldo in which the military perspective is explicitly stated even in the title and whose content reflects the general tenor of essays of this kind published between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work of Prata, which describes ‘the imposing mountain massif’ (Prata 1903, p. 4) of Monte Baldo, is innovative especially because of his attention to the geological aspects of the area and the strategic function of the mountain. He comments that the strategic importance of Monte Baldo in ‘addition to the inherent qualities of its terrain, mainly depends on its constituting the apex of the great Trentino salient, together with the land between Oglio and Garda, formed by the political border and penetrating into the heart of the provinces of Lombardy and Veneto’ (Prata 1903, pp. 35–36). Almost explicitly following the theories set out by Italian generals Giovanni Sironi (1873) and Carlo Porro (1898), Prata researches and examines ‘in a special way all those landforms and objects that may have an influence on military operations’ (Sironi 1873, p. 1) and analyses various geographical elements, in particular the nature of the ground, and links them to tactical and logistical issues.

A few years later, from being Europe’s ‘playground’ (Armiero 2013, p. 93), the Alps turned into a theatre of war. Even the hortus Europae did not escape this destiny: in the initial pre-World War I period, in fact, Monte Baldo had already become the subject of military geography studies, among which, in addition to the previously mentioned work by Prata, the most important is Guida Militare n. 12: Trentino (Battisti 1914). Cesare Battisti was an Italian-Austrian geographer, socialist politician and later Irredentist officer in the Italian Army.⁴ The Guida was published anonymously by the Italian Ministry of War to document the conditions of roads, paths, bridges and rivers beyond the Austrian border. At the start of the conflict, Monte Baldo was a bulwark well-guarded by fortifications built by Italians and Austrians towards the Val d’Adige between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continuing their function of dissuading any possible penetration along the north-south route. The area involved in the first actions of the war can be identified in the lines held by troops in the area. In the Verona area, trenches from the First World War overlap and sometimes merge with the pre-existing fortifications of 1848 (Gondola 1985). In the Trentino, a defensive line was created by the Italians in the summer of 1915 along the ridge extending from Altissimo towards the southern slopes of the Loppio Valley, providing excellent points for observation of the upper Garda and Val Lagarina, and as such, susceptible to radical transformations for the needs of war (Fig. 4.8; Bertè 1990).

Fig. 4.8

World War I Italian trench at Punta delle Redutte

It was Cesare Battisti, in letters sent from positions on Monte Baldo in 1915, who pointed out the weighty military impact on the environment. The changes are clear to see to those familiar with the mountain, and despite his role as a fighter, Battisti did not lose the observant eye of a geographer with respect to the impacts inflicted by war on ‘his’ landscape:

When the war is over, we will find everything changed ... Here war has a much darker and more tragic aspect than in the high mountains; here it is not just a war of soldiers against soldiers, it is a bestial fury against everything, against property, against the defenceless, against the land itself…. (Battisti 1915, p. 290)

The unit involved in the initial fighting on Monte Baldo was the Alpine battalion Verona, which, after crossing the border at Passo Campione, entered enemy territory to reach the Austrian positions and strengthen the new defensive line. Also involved alongside the Verona was the Lombard Volunteer Motorcycle battalion, which included futurist avant-garde artists such as Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who, in lulls in the fighting, wrote down their impressions of military life (Daly 2013). Boccioni, in 1915, provides an overall view of the military landscape of the area in drawings and notes presented as a series of snapshots: ‘landscape, action, objects, feelings, trees, Malga Casina, Dosso Mosca, fleeing Austrians, bayonet in the mouth’ (Boccioni 1915 p. 112). Marinetti, too, in sketches and notes, captures his perception of the environment, at the same time perceived as a theatre stage and a narrator itself: although from an unusual point of view, he draws attention to the presence of elements of a militarised landscape such as trenches and communication trenches (Ferro and Ferro-Francesconi 2000). The new scars inflicted on the mountain by war are clear to see from the scanty observations of these futurist soldiers, a sensitivity to the natural environment – that of the Futurists – which is decidedly atypical, but one which evidences a clear awareness of the transformation of the mountain landscape affected by military operations (see Premi 2016).

4 From War to Memory

On the southern ridges of Monte Baldo, not far from Bocchetta di Naole, a monument today commemorates the fallen soldiers of the war of liberation in 1943–1945, not just the partisans but also the men and women who ‘gave them strength and assistance’, as engraved on the memorial stone. This simple memorial cautions that while the First World War represented a turning point in the build-up of the military landscape on Monte Baldo, it was not, however, its culmination. This should be sought in the dramatic events of the Second World War. To add the missing pieces to the mosaic sketched out so far, we have to investigate the time of World War II, which, although with different impacts and in different ways, still affects the Monte Baldo area.

In 1944, Nazi-Fascist raids of the German occupants, supported by their allies of the Italian Social Republic from the plains of Verona and the Val d’Adige, gradually pushed northwards and intensified, especially in the foothills of Monte Baldo, where guerrilla warfare became established (what is now called asymmetrical warfare). In this new context, the mountain routes acquired a governing role over both the outcome of the fighting and the survival of those engaged in it as well as those in support operations (Martini 2015). Resistance on Monte Baldo began in the summer of 1944 when the Command of the Ateo Garemi partisan division assessed the possibility of extending its organisation into the mountains of Verona to counter Germans along the main communication routes between Italy and Germany: the Val d’Adige and eastern Garda area. The brigade active on Monte Baldo, the Avesani, was responsible for sabotaging connections between Italy and Germany. Once again, the Monte Baldo area was being viewed and examined from a strictly military point of view, and it is interesting to note that some relatively recent features have now been set as concrete reference points for a true military landscape. Of particular significance is the reuse by the Germans of fortifications built in World War I; this had already happened in the past, for example, in the case of the Fortino, built during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1703 and recovered by the Austrians during the First War of Independence in 1848, and other positions.

In the latter days of April 1945, peace was being spoken of in Europe, but fighting was still continuing on the eastern side of Lake Garda. Diaries kept by American soldiers tell the story of these last military operations, and among these is the war diary of Captain David R. Brower of the 86th Battalion of the US 10th Mountain Division (Brower 2013). Brower’s reactions to his first encounter with the Navene and Monte Baldo areas are particularly striking; his notes do not differ much from the gloom and unease felt at varying times in the past by other travellers when faced with this dark and forbidding landscape. Brower notes that what previously seemed to be landscapes illustrated ‘in Italian tourist posters, with very steep mountains and castle ruins towering over the countryside below’ had given way to images of gardens ravaged by grenade craters and uprooted trees (Brower 2013, p. 142). This is a view of change in the environment and landscape not dissimilar to that of Austrian Kaiserjäger Lieutenant Felix Hecht, who, between the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, pointed out the contrast between war and the beauty of the landscape and noted the devastating impact of war on the area:

It is a very sad spectacle to see so many fine evergreen bushes obstructed by grids linked to electricity, rose gardens crossed by trenches, villas with loopholes ... Here, by contrast, war takes on the face of death, destroying everything beautiful with a violent hand. (Menegus 1989, pp. 79–80)

5 Conclusions

This so well-described transformation process deserves to be explicitly revealed to today’s observers, too, in order not to risk the downsizing of the war on something obvious, common, familiar or even easy to rule. The military landscape, on Monte Baldo as elsewhere, retains its memorial, cultural and experiential power only if it still transmits even the most terrible and obscene aspects of the battles. Reading the landscape through a variety of written sources, even the most private and intimate testimonies, together with the official documents, can contribute to this purpose: as we have tried to demonstrate, there are in fact aspects in the construction of a landscape that can only be told in words and that cannot be found in the cartographic or photographic element.

Over the centuries, war has shaped and remodelled the nature of Monte Baldo, creating new features from time to time, and sites that have sadly become famous for battles that later became places for remembrance (Fig. 4.9), ‘consecrated by tradition to play an active part in preserving identifying or founding aspects’ of the past (Salvarani 2008, p. 2). When such features accumulate in an area and if they are still visible and understandable, so they become part of people’s collective memory and themselves become landscape: because a landscape ‘exists only once it is disvealed by a glance’ (Augé 2004, p. 41).

Fig. 4.9

Monte Baldo shrine, dedicated to the Veronese fallen in the First and Second World Wars