The mountains of Foza, on the Asiago Plateau, offer a glimpse of history that spans time and reaches all the way to Sardinia. This iron statue depicts an infantryman from the 151st Regiment of the Sassari Brigade, crafted using shrapnel and war debris recovered from Mount Fior and Mount Castelgomberto, in the Melette di Foza area, the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the First World War.
The artist from Foza, Paolo “Paolino” Lunardi, gave new life to those fragments of metal, transforming the remnants of war into a work that speaks above all of memory, sacrifice, and peace.
Not a celebration of war, then, but an invitation to remember the men who fought and died on those mountains. The cold metal of the shrapnel is bent and shaped into the likeness of a soldier: a way to restore a face, at least symbolically, to those thousands of young men who more than a century ago experienced the horrors of the front.
The protagonist of the work is an infantryman from the Sassari Brigade, a formation that wrote important pages in Italian military history during the Great War and which paid a very high price in terms of human lives on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni.
The connection between Foza and Sardinia is still clearly visible today. On the mountains of the plateau, there are numerous places, monuments, and memorials commemorating the sacrifice of the Sassari soldiers. This memory is not only part of military history, but has become an integral part of the identity of the territories that were the scene of the fighting.
It is in this spirit that the Friends of History Association of Foza has chosen to donate the statue to the Memorias Association of Sarroch, through its president Roberto Pazzini.
A gesture that takes on a special meaning because it strengthens a relationship born from the shared memory of the Great War and has grown, over time, into a bond of friendship between geographically distant communities. On one side, Foza and the Altopiano, on the other, Sardinia: two realities united by the memory of the Sassari infantrymen who fought in the mountains of Vicenza.
The donation to the 151st "Sassari" Infantry Regiment, heir to that tradition, thus aims to pay homage not only to a military unit, but to all the men who were part of it and who left a part of their lives on the Melette.
The statue thus becomes a bridge between past and present. The fragments that once belonged to the weapons and devastation of the conflict are transformed into something different: a symbol capable of telling history without glorifying war.
Looking at it ideally means returning to the paths of Monte Fior and Monte Castelgomberto, where over a hundred years ago the soldiers of Sassari faced fierce battles. But it also means listening, through the silence of iron, to the stories of the men who passed through those places.
This is the deepest meaning of Lunardi's work: transforming the remnants of war into memory and memory into a message of peace.
And so, from the mountains of Foza to Sardinia, that infantryman from the "Sassari" continues his journey. No longer toward the front, but toward the future, carrying with him the memory of a shared history and a friendship that still unites two communities today.