Square and cemetery

You are in the main square of Tarvisio, where in 1914 the soldiers from the Franz Joseph Barracks in Tarvisio gathered to leave for the Russian front. In August ’14 they left for Galicia; most of the fallen soldiers from the Val Canale, from our area, almost all died in Galicia. Those eighteen-year-olds died in 1914; even now, on the monuments, on the commemorative plaques found in some villages of the Val Canale, though not in all of them, the dates are still visible. We Italians entered the war the following year, in 1915, and Tarvisio was almost immediately, in September 1915, bombarded from the Italian lines, damaging the church, the medieval tower and the surroundings hotels, because they were probably targeting the Forestry Barracks, which was marked on maps as a military barracks.
This is lesser-known front, obviously, than the Dolomites or the Karst front, but this front too was important. It was a mountain front; our mountains are not very high, but they are almost as harsh as the 3,000-metre peaks of Trentino. The border was about twenty kilometres from here, at Pontebba, between Pontebba and Pontafel, a village divided in two, always a border between two communities. But then it climbed up along the ridge that divides the Val Fella from the Val Dogna, and therefore extended towards the Valbruna area. At the end of the war, not immediately in 1918, but after various discussions and decisions about where to place the border, Tarvisio became Italian, like the whole Val Canale. The border at Coccau, which was made official in 1921, I think, and it is a military border. The place is well suited for defence; it is the narrowest point of the valley; it is not the natural geological border. We should have placed the border between Valbruna and Camporosso, where the watershed dividing the two hydrogeological zones lies.
Going down from the square towards Lower Tarvisio, the river we see on our right, the Bartolo, flows into the Black Sea. The water appears to flow to the left and you say: “But how can that be? Before Camporosso it flowed in the opposite direction.” This is what the watershed divides: the Fella river ends in the Adriatic Sea; the Bartolo stream, which then ends in the Slizza and goes into the Gail, eventually reaches the Danube and ends in the Black Sea.
An educational route, a thematic park, has been created in the Val Saisera area where, also thanks to the Tourism Promotion Consortium, PromoTurismoFVG, I lead guided tours for tourists, in summer and in winter; in winter with snowshoes, if there is snow, in summer without. It is an easy route, suitable for everyone. It was created specifically so that anyone can come and see the remains of the Great War, which can also be found on the valley floor. We find tunnels, bunkers, trenches, partly restored, but most of them have been left as they were. And then along the route there are panels explaining, with photographs and texts, what stood there 110 years ago.