On May 24, 1915, Italy entered the First World War. A carnage that will cost 650.000 deaths among the military, and almost as many among the civilian population.
Many of them fell on the Dolomite front, in the series of battles that took place in one of the most beautiful places in the world, now an UNESCO World Heritage Site, following an outdated military idea that aimed to conquer the peaks to control the valleys, a tactic that cost to Italy the most significant defeat of its history, in Caporetto.
Just 100 years after that battle, in October 2017, I started a documentation of the Dolomite front, one hundred years after those tragic events.
The road that Rommel traveled with his armies during the most extraordinary Austro-German military operation is visible from the top of the Vajont dam. And then woods, trenches, military positions that have now become an open-air museum or are completely abandoned to the neglect of time. Each of these places tells, behind a tourist industry now out of control, stories of unspeakable suffering, fatigue, cold and death.
So the Dolòmia, the limestone rock that geologically characterizes these mountains, absorbing these tragic events becomes Dolomìa: a whisper, a complaint, a song of pain that remains in these lands, one hundred years after the end of these facts.