![]() He proposed to entomb the corpse of an Unknown Soldier in the Pantheon, where the two previous kings of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy (1820-1878) and Umberto I, King of Italy (1844-1900), rested, to embody symbolically the totality of those who had died on the battlefields. ![]() In Italy, the idea of honouring a Milite ignoto (Unknown Soldier) was espoused for the first time by Colonel Giulio Douhet (1869-1930) in the pages of the periodical Il Dovere on 24 August 1920. ![]() In Italy, however, nation-building and political meanings of sacrifice linked to this cult of the fallen were largely exploited by the following Fascist dictatorship. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier thus acted as a symbolic burial and emblem of modern mourning for entire nations. Mourning had, indeed, both a private and a public dimension. The rituals surrounding the anonymous body legitimated the grief of individuals and families for their losses, thus uncovering the collectiveness of the post-war traumatic experience. Anonymity was the fate of millions of corpses, who had no known grave. In particular, the ceremony in which a single, anonymous body was buried to symbolize the overwhelming trauma of the battlefields spanned numerous countries. Though each nation chose its own language of commemoration, some features were universal. At the end of the First World War, the ex-belligerent countries participated in a series of commemorative rituals.
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