Point of interest

The war memorial in the parish churchyard of Palazzolo, the first to be erected in the Veneto region and the fourth in Italy after the end of the First World War, was inaugurated on 3 August 1919. The story goes that during the war Don Augusto visited families, wrote to soldiers at the front, and wanted to dedicate an altar in front of the church, on which he could duly lay the tears and grief of the families of the heroes who had died at the front. When the armistice was signed in Padua, at Villa Giusti, on 3 November 1918, the priest set up a committee under the regulations called the “Commission” which he headed. He met the families of the village, collected donations, drew up the project for the monument and suggested a broken column. He ordered the marble from Sant’Ambrogio di Valpolicella and commissioned the artist Ferrari to make the sculpture. He hired bricklayers and labourers who at that time were the invalid soldiers repatriated from the front line or from the Mauthausen prison camps, defined as ‘the cities of the dying’.