BOLZANO. The 152/o anniversary of the Alpine Corps was celebrated by the Army Alpine Troops Command in Bolzano today, Tuesday 15 October, the date on which – in 1872 – the decree establishing the first fifteen companies of Italian mountain soldiers was signed in Naples.
The commemorative ceremony – with the mass and the laying of a wreath on the tombstone of the Fallen – was held at the Palazzo Alti Comandi and was presided over by the general Michele Risicommander of the Alpine Troops, with the president of the Bolzano Section of the National Alpine Association Pasquale D’Ambrosiotogether with the men and women of the Command on which the ten thousand soldiers belonging to the Taurinense and Julia brigades depend – stationed respectively in Turin and Udine – and to the Alpine Training Center of Aosta.
The Alpine Corps was founded in 1872 to defend the borders through slim but compact and logistically autonomous units, made up of men already accustomed to life and toil in the mountains. The training consists of long marches in the mountains, in Spartan conditions. The baptism of fire, however, took place far from the Alps: in 1896 an expeditionary force took part in the Eritrean campaign.
The Great War saw thousands of Italian mountain soldiers fighting on the front line in the Venetian, Trentino and Friulian Alps in extreme climatic and environmental conditions.