Tempio di Cargnacco
The Tempio di Cargnacco (English Temple of Cargnacco ) is both a Catholic parish church ( Madonna del Conforto ) and a national memorial with an attached military cemetery in Cargnacco, a fraction of the municipality of Pozzuolo del Friuli in the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia . It commemorates the around 90,000 Italian soldiers who fell in the Soviet Union during World War II or who died there in captivity.
Brief description
The church and memorial was built after the war thanks to an initiative of the military chaplain Carlo Caneva and according to plans by the architect Giacomo Della Mea. Both were veterans of the Italian Expeditionary Corps and the 8th Army in the Soviet Union.
The monumental facade consists of three entrance doors in two rows of three Roman arches each, the lower one also serving as a balcony. The upper end is a third row with smaller arches, where the church bells are also attached. There is a white cross above it. The church building is 25 meters high, 51 meters long and 22 meters wide. On the two long sides of the nave there are nine large arched windows, again in three rows, with rose windows on the side altars . Inside you can see various works of art depicting scenes from the war in the Soviet Union. Behind the main altar is a crypt with a tomb of the unknown soldier of the Italian Expeditionary Force and the 8th Army in the Soviet Union. It is surrounded by the coats of arms of the Italian divisions that were deployed there. In the crypt there are also 24 books with the names of all those killed and missing. In 1992, the Italian War Graves Commission built a second crypt in which the remains of Italian soldiers who had died in Ukraine and Russia are buried, unless the respective relatives or descendants determine otherwise. So were z. B. in September 2000 the remains of Silvano Abbà were transferred to the cemetery.
On the forecourt there is a war memorial and twelve steles with the names of the Italian divisions and other associations that fought in the Soviet Union and were mostly destroyed there.
Web links
- Official website (Italian)
- Brief description of the church and memorial (Italian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Silvano Abbà. digilander.libero.it, accessed on March 21, 2020 (Italian).
Coordinates: 46 ° 0 ′ 10.2 " N , 13 ° 14 ′ 13.7" E