The pyramid of the Italians is photogenic, despite the graffiti that vandalizes it and the obvious neglect in which it has been immersed for decades. If it were an icon to make a pilgrimage to, the traveler would feel disappointed and let go of the arrow passing Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty: “It looked bigger in the photo.” This month it happened when the regional government of PP and Vox agreed on a BIC declaration (good of cultural interest) to protect it, according to them, from the backhoes of historical memory. The truth is that, with its fascist symbols gone, it was never in the State’s plans to demolish it.
Half-forgotten in the rough and windy solitude, from the El Escudo road that surrounds it, the pyramid would be called an abandoned shelter under a gigantic telecommunications antenna, a barren and unpleasant enclave, without a single tree, but blessed with a Stendhaliana view to the south, where the slope plunges towards the Corconte spa, the sheet of water of the Ebro reservoir and, opposite it, the white sand of Arija. The port of El Escudo not only separates the Cantabrian greenery from the Meseta, it also usually takes on the grayness at its peak. Often, shortly after crowning, the sun comes out. The mausoleum, erected in 1939, was officially Franco’s order, but the truth is that it was Mussolini’s work, since it was not to the Spaniard’s taste that foreign troops immortalize victories that he wanted to be his. Although it has a columbarium inside with hundreds of niches, only the officers of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie lay there. The more than three hundred buried soldiers were scattered in the wasteland around the pyramid, which was to be crowned by a winged victory that was never built.
The capture of the province by the Italians was celebrated as a feat in Rome, except for a thirty-year-old correspondent who described it as a skirmish: Cantabria fell in a few days and with little resistance, Indro Montanelli narrated, who was immediately summoned in Rome for irritating skepticism and banished to Estonia as a reader of Italian. Sixty years later, now in his nineties, he recounted the episode with veteran shame to La Vanguardia’s correspondent in Rome, Enric Juliana: “Instead of shooting me, they sent me on holiday to Tallinn: this Italian fascism thing was a bit of a comedy”.
Franco let it be recorded as his initiative a pyramid presided over by a five-meter M that betrays the promoter – who wanted to resurrect the Roman Empire with geodesic vertices of its glories and payments -, as PP and Vox pretend today an operation by Brothers of Italy, the party of Giorgia Meloni. Senator Roberto Menia presented an initiative to the Italian Upper House to request that the Ministers of Culture and Defense act to prevent the demolition of “a work that represents a funeral testimony that deserves respect beyond political connotations”. Menia, vice-president of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, applauds the PP and Vox: “It is a sweet victory, because it embodies the defense of values, history, honor and Italianness”. Italianness. You have to imagine how the generalissimo’s teeth would grind if he heard it. “It doesn’t matter to us if they were Italian, if they had been German we would have defended it just the same”, assures La Vanguardia Nicola Procaccini, leader of the Eurogroup of Conservatives and Reformists, which includes Vox and Germans d’Italia.
The Mussolini operation has created more controversy in Italy than here. The National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) has become enraged: “It is not a sanctuary, but a mortuary reminder of the bloody victory of Spanish fascism and a lethal dictatorship”, says the statement sent to the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, in which they remember that there were also Italian partisans in the international brigades.
In 1971, a military bus of relatives who were returning to visit the cemetery went off the road going down the port, in what is now known as the bend of the Italians – more famous than the pyramid in the area – and twelve people died, adding death to death and turning El Escudo into the accursed mountain of the Italians. Following the tragedy, the Transalpine government exhumed the remains and repatriated them. Nothing remains but the gigantic concrete M, the icy wind and the distracted cows, ruminating in the pasture.
