Monument to the Fallen of Dogali - Roma, Italy - Specific Wars Monuments and Memorials on Waymarking.com

The monument is dedicated to the fallen of the military column, by Lieutenant Colonel Tommaso Giovanni De Cristoforis and composed of 500 Italian soldiers, who on January 26th 1887 was defeated at the Battle of Dogali, near Massaua, now in Eritrea, by the Ethiopian soldiers of Ras Alula during the Eritrea War. In the episode 413 soldiers and 22 Italian officers died, remembered in the tombstones at the base of the monument. The defeat caused some demonstrations and incidents in the Italian capital during the following days. The proposal of a monument to celebrate the Italian defeat in a colonial war was questioned by some intellectuals of the time, in particular Giosuè Carducci, who refused the Roman mayor's offer to compose an ode for the monument, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, who in the third chapter of the third book of his novel The Pleasure defines the Italian dead as "brutally killed brutes".

Initially the monument was raised in 1887 by the architect Francesco Azzurri in front of the Termini Station, then moved in 1925 to its present location in the gardens of Viale Einaudi for the reconstruction of the railway station.

The monument consists of an Egyptian obelisk, one of the ten present in Rome today, and a base that houses the tombstones on the four sides with the names of the fallen on two columns and collected according to the military rank to which they belong. The single monolith is 6.34 meters high while with the base it reaches 16.92 meters. The bronze plate reads "AGLI EROI DI DOGALI" (To the heros of Dogali). The monument was officially dedicated on 5 June 1887, on the occasion of the feast of the Albertine Statute.

The obelisk was built during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II and placed in the city of Heliopolis, in Egypt. Later it was brought to Rome by the emperor Domitian, who had it placed as a decoration for the Iseo Campense, like the obelisks of the Pantheon, of the Minerva and that of Boboli (which is in Florence). The obelisk was found in 1883 by the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva

Source: Wikipedia (visit link)

War: First Italo-Ethiopian War Is it permanently accessible to the public?: yes Is it necessary to pay a fee to gain access to the place?: no Year of the memorial or monument: 1925

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