During the First World War huge losses were registered in terms of human lives, and Italy was heavily affected throughout its territory:  memorial tablets devoted to the soldiers killed in war are present even in the smallest Italian villages.
Such grief translated into tangible memory in the “Memorial Parks”, or in the hundreds of commemorative monuments and steles that our present duty imposes to restore and include in a “Network of Memory”.
In line with the activities carried out in recent years by some Regional Monuments and Fine Arts Offices (Veneto, Campania, Lazio, Lombardy, Trentino, Emilia), the special technical-scientific Committee established at the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism promoted the networking of the most complete cataloguing of all memorial tablets, inscriptions, and monuments relating to the First World War (according to estimates, amounting to over 12,000 units).
The Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, through the funds allocated by Law 78 of 2001, launched a programme of interventions aimed to the protection of the historical, artistic and monumental heritage; during the years of Commemorations, such support will be further extended in order to guarantee the restoration and the suitable conservation of monuments or works of art related to the Great War.
These are the grounds for the development of the project called “One hundred monuments for the centenary”, through which the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism and the Task Force of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers intend to implement a programme for the restoration of one hundred particularly degraded monuments; they will be identified and selected by the “Historical-technical committee for the anniversaries of national interest” according to their historical and artistic value.
This will be a very important step in the implementation of the “Ecomuseum”, which will also allow intervening in the regions that were less directly involved in the conflict, such as central and southern Italy regions, but that contributed to the war with their soldiers and suffered from its tragic consequences.