The Solferino Ossuary and San Martino: The Chapels of Skulls From the 1859 Battle

The fighting at Solferino and San Martino was part of the Second Italian War of Independence. On one side stood Austria; on the other, the allied armies of France and Sardinia, led by Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II. According to Rai Cultura, the battle stretched across a long front, from Medole through Solferino to San Martino. It lasted about 14 to 15 hours.

The scale was enormous. The Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict describes about 300,000 troops in the field, about 30,000 killed and many thousands wounded. The allied victory pushed Austria toward the Armistice of Villafranca, according to the Fondation Napoléon.

Casualty figures vary from one account to the next. The Fondation Napoléon records about 20,000 Austrian and 18,000 French casualties. Rai Cultura reports about 5,000 Sardinian dead and wounded, nearly twice that number for the French, and about 22,000 Austrian losses.

Among the people who arrived after the battle was Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman travelling in northern Italy. He stayed to help wounded soldiers and civilians in the days after the battle. In 1862 he published *A Memory of Solferino*, his account of what he saw.

The book did more than describe suffering. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, it proposed two things: volunteer relief societies in every country, and an international agreement to protect wounded soldiers and the people who helped them.

Those ideas moved quickly. A five-member committee, the group that became the ICRC, first met in Geneva on 17 February 1863, as the ICRC's history of the emblems records. The first International Conference met in October 1863, and the First Geneva Convention was adopted in August 1864. The ICRC publishes the book and, on its page for A Memory of Solferino, counts Dunant's proposals among the movement's origins.

So, the link between Solferino and the Red Cross runs straight through this battlefield: the dead in these chapels and the wounded Dunant tended came out of the same day.

The Solferino ossuary stands in a church that existed before the battle. According to the Italian Ministry of Culture, the former Church of San Pietro in Vincoli was given by the Mantua episcopal curia, the diocese's governing office, to the Società Solferino e San Martino. The Società restored it, and it opened as the Cappella Ossario, the ossuary chapel, in early June 1870.

Inside, the Ministry's page records 1,413 skulls and numerous bones of soldiers who fell in the battle. The Società's own page on Solferino presents the chapel as a place of remembrance. It is part of a small group of sites on Via Ossario, together with the Risorgimento museum and the fortress, the Rocca.

A few weeks after Solferino's chapel opened, its counterpart at San Martino della Battaglia followed. According to the Società's page on San Martino, the ossuary was originally the private chapel of the Treccani family. It was inaugurated on 24 June 1870, eleven years to the day after the battle.

The skulls are in the apse, the curved end of the chapel, and the Società counts 1,274 of them. The crypt below holds the bones of 2,619 soldiers. They rest without distinction of nationality, so Austrian, French and Sardinian soldiers lie together.

The Società's inscription at San Martino puts that idea into words: those who were enemies in battle now rest together in the silence of the tomb. The ossuary stands beside the tower and museum at Via Torre 2, San Martino della Battaglia, in a park that the Municipality of Desenzano del Garda describes as publicly accessible.

A hundred years after the battle, the Red Cross came back to Solferino. In 1959, the centenary, the International Red Cross erected the Red Cross Memorial there. The Società's Solferino page describes it as a memorial to the humanitarian idea that took shape around Henry Dunant at Solferino and to the creation of the International Red Cross.

It stands at the end of a cypress-lined path leading from the park around the fortress, according to the local tourism site Land of Upper Mantua. A visit to the ossuary and the memorial together tells both halves of the story: the soldiers who died, and the movement that grew out of caring for those who survived.

Both ossuaries were built as places of commemoration for the dead of the battle, and San Martino gathers soldiers of every army in one place. The Società's inscription there spells out what that means: former enemies sharing one tomb.

Other battlefields in Europe have their own ossuaries. For one from the First World War, read about the Douaumont ossuary at Verdun, and for another monument tied to the dead of war, see the Skull Tower of Niš in Serbia.

The two chapels are separate sites, each with its own details.

At Solferino, the Società's English page lists the ossuary as free of charge. The Italian Ministry of Culture page, last updated on 14 January 2021, lists the museum, fortress and ossuary complex at Via Ossario with opening hours of 9:00 to 12:30 and 14:30 to 19:00, closed on Mondays, and admission of €2.50 full and €2 reduced. The Società's English page lists different prices for the museum and fortress. Because the two pages disagree, confirm current prices and hours with the official site before you travel.

At San Martino della Battaglia, the Società's San Martino page lists combined museum and tower admission at €10 for adults, free for children up to 10, and €8 for ages 11 to 18, visitors over 65 and groups. It notes an annual opening schedule and sends visitors to its ticket office page for current hours. Confirm the hours and site rules, including photography, with the ticket office before visiting.

A few short answers for visitors and Red Cross readers.

Solferino and San Martino belong to a wider family of ossuaries. For a tour of others, start with ossuaries around the world, then the Sedlec Ossuary and the Brno Ossuary in the Czech Republic.

Two other stories in this series follow remains kept in their keepers' care. In Sicily, the Palermo catacombs hold Capuchin friars and the city's families, and in Egypt, the monks of St Catherine's Monastery keep the skulls of their own brothers in a charnel house.

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