Civic Museum of the Risorgimento

The First World War left millions dead in Europe and every city and village erected monuments to honor them, bearing highly detailed and widespread testimony to the great tragedy of the War.
This online archive, which accepts collaboration from institutions, private individuals and associations, contains iconographic documentation of Italian monuments to the fallen during the Great War.

The idea of creating an office in Bologna to provide information to families of military personnel was advanced as a private initiative with the purpose of compensating for the shortcomings of a similar system managed by the Italian armed forces. The initiative followed the paradigm of similar actions initiated in 1914 in France and other countries already involved in the conflict.

The Museo Civico del Risorgimento of Bologna conserves many thousands of photographs from the 1914-1918 war. This online collection presents an initial group of 2,244 photos from albums and collections donated by private citizens or obtained via the army or other state organs during or immediately after the war years.

A collection of several thousand stamps and over 1,100 documents assembled by Giorgio Tabarroni (1921-2001), a historian of science who also dabbled in philately and the history of the postal system, was donated in installments to the museum in the years 2002-2007. This virtual section has been set up also to allow access to this collection, including documents regarding the history of the postal system that are not otherwise displayed. The collection is almost exclusively dedicated to the Island of Malta and others in the Aegean Sea.