Paolo Caccia Dominioni

Monument to Paolo Caccia Dominioni in the central tower of the Italian military cemetery in El Alamein

The El Alamein Italian war cemetery designed by Paolo Caccia Dominioni. 5200 Italian soldiers rest here.

Count and Baron Paolo Caccia Dominioni di Sillavengo (born May 4, 1896 in Nerviano near Milan , † August 12, 1992 in Rome ) was an Italian engineer , architect , officer and writer . He gained notoriety for his years of efforts to recover, identify and bury those killed in the Battle of El Alamein .

Life

Caccia Dominioni came from a noble Lombard family . His father Carlo was a diplomat , which is why Paolo spent a large part of his youth abroad. In 1913 he enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic , where he studied engineering . At the outbreak of World War I , he joined Palermo as a volunteer in the 10th Bersaglieri - Regiment one. From November 1915 to March 1916 he completed brief training as an officer in Turin . As such, he fought only in a bridge pioneer unit on Isonzo and then in a flamethrower - subunit . After his brother fell at the end of January 1918, Paolo Caccia Dominioni was transferred to Libya in April 1918 , where he contracted the Spanish flu .

In 1919 he returned to Italy . There he became a member of the fascist party , but turned away from it in 1921. After completing his engineering and architecture studies, he went to Egypt in 1924 . There and in neighboring countries he designed a number of buildings. In 1931 he was temporarily reactivated by the military and used on a reconnaissance and surveying mission in southern Libya, after which he was promoted to captain. Another reactivation took place in 1935 because of the war in Ethiopia , where Caccia Dominioni was used, among other things, as a spy in Sudan . After the outbreak of World War II , he was reactivated in 1941 and again assigned to the SIM military intelligence service because of his knowledge of foreign countries and languages ​​(French, English, German, Arabic, some African languages) . After he had requested his transfer to the pioneer troop, he took over as major in July 1942, command of the 31st Combat Pioneer Battalion in North Africa. For his service in the first battle of El Alamein he received the Iron Cross second class from Erwin Rommel , for the second battle the Italian silver medal for bravery . He remained on treatment until May 1943 because of his poor health. Then he took over a mountain pioneer battalion.

After the armistice of Cassibile and the German occupation of Italy , Caccia Dominioni went underground in September 1943. In his home town of Nerviano he organized one of the first partisan groups of the Resistancea , and from January 1944 he fought in the 106th Garibaldi Partisan Brigade . He was temporarily detained in July and August 1944 and in January 1945. In April 1945, shortly before the uprisings in northern Italy, he became head of the staff of the Corpo Lombardo Volontari della Libertà , a larger partisan formation in Lombardy.

After the war he returned to his engineering office in Cairo . In 1948 he was commissioned by the Italian embassy to look after the Italian military cemetery in El Alamein . He not only planned and built the new Italian military cemetery there, which still exists today, but also spent more than ten years looking for the remains of fallen soldiers from all armies involved in the battle on site in the desert. Part of the search took place in minefields , which resulted in two explosions that killed six of his employees. In 1958 Caccia Dominioni returned to Italy and married there, but continued to spend time in El Alamein. As an architect, he designed and built several military cemeteries and memorials until the end of his life, including the Sacrario Militare dei Caduti d'Oltremare in Bari , where numerous Italian soldiers who had fallen “overseas” (Africa) were buried. He also worked as a writer. Alamein 1933-1962 is one of his most famous works .

Lieutenant Colonel Paolo Caccia Dominioni died in 1992 at the age of 96 in the Celio Military Hospital in Rome. In 2002, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi awarded him the gold medal of military merit on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein.

Works

• La fine del Carso . Tipografia A. Procaccia, Alexandria 1928.
• Basta con questa guerra . Stamperia Lencioni, Cairo 1931.
• Amhara - Chroniques de la Patrouille Astrale . Plon, 1937.
• Resurrezione e ardore di un cantiere in terra lontana Ankara d'anatolia, estate 1938-XVI . Rizzoli, 1938.
• Diario di Bordo . 1944.
• Casa del perduto amore . H. Urwand & fils, Cairo 1949.
• I Ragazzi della Folgore (preparatory work by Alberto Bechi Luserna). Alfieri, 1956.
• Alamein 1933-1962 . Longanesi, 1962.
• Diario 1915-1919 . Longanesi, 1965.
• Ascari K7 . Longanesi, 1966.
• Takfir. Cronaca dell'ultima battaglia di Alamein nei documenti del 31º Battaglione guastatori d'Africa . Longanesi, 1967.
• Le 300 ore a north of Qattara . Longanesi, 1972.
• Alpino alla Macchia . Cavallotti, 1977.
• La frana del San Matteo . Cavallotti, 1983.

Web links

• Brief description on esercito.difesa.it
• Short biography on anpi.it