The “Landscapes” of the Great War. The role of Italian engineers and architects

At the end of the First World War, it became apparent that four years of conflict had left just the wrecks of homes in valleys, hills, and mountains, and lawns and pasturelands scattered with barbed wire and torched woods. Fields had turned into graveyards, empty lots had been invaded by armies of crosses, factories were devastated, churches torn out, and, above all, an endless firmament of trench lines and craters seamed the land. To the men who served and survived, this wounded landscape was a constant reminder of the horror of watching fellow soldiers suffer and die in the mud. Among those haunted by such nightmare images were the many architects and engineers who served the war effort by manning posts on the front, working for the Corps of Military Engineers, and building defense facilities, trench lines, and roads, among other works of infrastructure. Architects and engineers formed an elite corps of educated commissioned and non-commissioned officers, many of them volunteers, whose expertise in architecture and engineering went hand-in-hand with a shared faith in the “Fatherland.” Although little is known today about the bereavement and process of coping with trauma of this architectural and engineering elite, it is possible to trace their work at the front, beyond what Marc Bloch defined as the “psychology of witnessing” applied to the Great War. At the same time, it is also necessary to analyze the “war-related work” that they completed both during and immediately after the fighting. The aim of this essay is to analyze three different meanings of “landscape.” The contribution is therefore divided into three sections. The first part, “The Wounded Landscape,” will explain how young engineers and architects knew and modified the landscape of the war when they found themselves at the front to fight against the Austro-German soldiers. The second part, “The Reconstructed Landscape,” concerns how architects and engineers rebuilt houses and churches on the basis of a specific idea of “landscape.” Finally, the third part, “The Commemorated Landscape,” deals with the theme of the “evoked landscape” in the monuments to the fallen and in the war memorials built both on the battlefields and in the squares of every Italian city.