Palmanova: A Renaissance City at War

Palmanova, Italy, Today

The beautiful and intriguing  fortress city of Palmanova is located in the Friuli region of Italy roughly midway between Venice and Trieste. With its perfect nine-pointed star shape, monumental entrance gates, and the three circles of fortifications from the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries,  Palmanova is at the same time a model Renaissance city and an example of military architecture that reveals in concrete detail the technical developments of the science of fortification construction in the modern era. It was built at the end of the 16th century by the Venetian Republic and intended as both a major trading site and a citadel. The military architect Giulio Savorgnan designed it to be a Venetian military station on the eastern frontier as protection from the Ottoman Empire. Italy declared the entire town a national monument in 1960.

The City's Beautiful Architecture

During the First World War it was positioned just to the rear of the Italian force deployed along the Isonzo River and served as a strategically key logistics center. It was at a rail and roads crossroads and proved an excellent site for warehouses and hospitals, and its massive central Piazza Grande served as an excellent exercise field for drilling troops. Early in the war, because of its key position, the city was also a center for processing and evacuating refugees from the combat zone.

The Massive Piazza Grande

Despite the destruction of most official documents concerning Italy's brutal policy regarding summary executions for the troops (loosely called decimation and described as "extreme measures of coercion and repression" by commanding general Luigi Cadorna in his private papers), Palmonova is believed to be the site of at least one of the major group executions during the war.

Damage at Palmanova's Train Station from Enemy Artillery

With the rout of Caporetto in October 1917 and the retreat of the Italian Second Army to the south, Palmanova was bombarded, abandoned by its remaining defenders, and occupied by a garrison of about 2,500 Austro-Hungarian Troops until the last days of the war.  In the Second World War, its major function was as a base for suppressing anti-fascist resistance in the region.

Monument at the Austro-Hungarian Cemetery

The Austro-Hungarian cemetery of Palmanova is one of the main war cemeteries in Friuli and accommodates the remains of over 19,000 soldiers, most of them from the battlefields around Gorizia. The entrance sign identifies them as "captured" rather than killed in action, so it might be the case that a large percentage of them died while in captivity. It contains a chapel and two large mass graves where the remains of over 13,000 unknown soldiers were buried.