When I walked up from the piazzetta to the statue there was an old man sitting on one of the benches around the memorial. I unavoidably thought the same as Elio did three decades ago here, how many of them “still remembered the young men they’d lost on the Piave River.” And then immediately I would add those thirty years to that moment and realize: “You’d have to be at least eighty years old today to have known them. And at least one hundred, if not more, to have been older than them” – meaning 110 and respectively 140 years now. Impossible. “At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief.”
I was surprised to learn that in B there are more than just one World War I Memorials. In Piazza Giuseppe Garibaldi by the bus stop, close to the farmer’s market, the florist and the book store there’s a small park with a statue in the memory of those lost in the war.
