Ai Caduti Ignoti

Ai Caduti Ignoti stands in Jesolo, marking the former Cà Gamba military cemetery beside the landscape of the Piave battles. Today, a public park surrounds the site. A commemorative stone and sections of the perimeter wall remain visible, while dense vegetation conceals some areas. These surviving traces give you a quiet view of a place shaped by wartime burials and later neglect.

Cà Gamba opened during the First World War for soldiers who died in battles along the Piave River. Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers were buried there, and local memory once called the grounds the German cemetery. An unknown soldier from this ground was later selected for burial at Rome’s Altare della Patria. Military shrines eventually received the Italian remains, while the cemetery was dismantled after years of overgrowth and farm use.

A pyramid-shaped Istrian-stone monument once stood at the cemetery’s centre, surrounded by naval posts and a heavy anchor chain. Its golden inscriptions recorded sailors lost at Cortellazzo, Caposile, the Piave and Vittorio Veneto. The monument now stands in Piazza Giacomo Matteotti, while stones from Monte Grappa form another memorial in Piazzetta Fanti del Mare. Nearby, Ponte della Vittoria carries four obelisks inscribed with local soldiers’ and sailors’ names.