8/5/2023 0 Comments Isonzo river![]() Memorial stones honor battles and individual soldiers, and grandiose ossuary monuments built by Italy's Fascist regime in the 1930s house the remains of scores of thousands of mostly nameless Italian soldiers. ![]() Remote valleys hide all but forgotten military graveyards remnants of trenches, fortifications and defense caves pock the hills. On a recent trip along the Isonzo, on both sides of the Italy-Slovenia frontier, I found the region studded with physical memories of the conflict. "The hills around here are really bathed in blood," says Giuseppe Esposito, director of the Museum of the Great War in Gorizia, a bustling town on the border with Slovenia, where much of Hemingway's novel took place. Today, 80 years after the end of World War I, the names of the battles and the sites where they took place along the turquoise course of the Isonzo River still resonate with surprising power. More than half a million died, from wounds, disease and thirst, from horrific conditions in the trenches. Here, between 19, millions of soldiers from Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire fought across a rugged landscape of limestone hills and mountains known as the Carso. ![]() "A Farewell to Arms" is set on the Isonzo Front in northeastern Italy. "Only the names of places had dignity," wrote Ernest Hemingway in his bitter novel of World War I, "A Farewell to Arms." "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of the villages … the names of rivers."
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