A Century of Pasubio War Memorial

The bones-cemetery (Ossario) of the war at the Pasubio mountain near Schio (VI) completes a century this year. Among the different events organised for this anniversary is an exhibition organised at Toaldi-Capra villa in Schio's city centre in June 2026.

The Ossario is about 22 kms from our home and yet it is visible from our terrace, a tiny finger raised up towards the sky at the point where two mountains meet on the horizon. Often, in the morning, when we wake up, we take a look at it to check the day's weather - if it is well visible, or if there is fog denoting humidity or if there are clouds. Thus, it is a kind of personal landmark for us, almost like a family monument.

Let me start this post with a brief background to the battles fought here about a hundred years ago.

First World War in the Pasubio Mountains

Italy joined the first world war in May 1915. Before that, over the past few centuries, this part of Italy known as Alto Vicentino and characterised by Dolomite mountains, had been controlled alternately between the Romans, Vatican (and Austrian-Hungarian empire supporting the Pope) and the Republic of Venice.

When the first world war broke out, the areas north-east to Schio were under Austrian-Hungarian empire, the site where the bones-cemetery was built was also the boundary between Italy and Austria. The Austrian-Hungarian empire lost that war, and the border between Italy and Austria was pushed up to about 175 kms to the north-east.

There were two main sites of battles in this area - Pasubio mountain and the high-plains of Asiago. About a 100,000 soldiers fought at Pasubio and around 10% of them died.

A significant aspect of this war was the building of tunnels inside the mountains, where army officers' offices, ammunition-dumps and hospitals were created. Old mule-tracks were revitalised and new paths were built in the mountains by the soldiers. One famous mountain path, going up along Pasubio had 52 tunnels, all built by soldiers with their own hands and the help of mules.

Construction of the Bones-Cemetery War Memorial

Apart from the war injuries, people also died due to land-slides and extreme cold, especially in winter 1917. Many battles took place in high mountains and narrow mountain passes, difficult to reach. Some bodies were identified and given a burial, but many were not and bodies of the soldiers from the two sides were left in the mountains or buried where ever they were found.

The first idea of creating a war memorial to remember those dead came up in 1917, while the war was going on, when some soldiers asked the bishop of Vicenza for a Madonna statue to be placed inside one of the tunnels. While the Madonna statue was provided, the bishop Ferdinando Rodolfi also started a fund-collection campaign to build a proper monument for the dead. A committee was created for this purpose, at the end of the war, on 3 November 1918.

Architect Ferruccio Chemello, who had designed the civic theatre of Schio was given this responsibility of designing the monument and a hill known as Bella Vista at an altitude of 1265 metres, at the base of Pasubio mountain was chosen for it (the image above shows some of his designs from the exhibition held in Schio in June 2026). The construction started on 1 July 1920 and it was completed around the end of 1925 and the beginning of 1926.

War Memorial and Bones-Cemetery

The memorial has a 35 metres high quadrangular tower in Romana-Bizantine style, with a massive underground basement used as a cemetery for the bones of about five thousand Italian and Austrian soldiers, some of them have names, others are anonymous.

There is chapel at the base, as one enters the tower, with a Madonna statue by sculptor Giuseppe Zanetti. A staircase goes up to four storeys while all around the walls have frescoes and painted glass-windows with a mix of war and religion related images by the artist Tito Chini (images below).

The whole war memorial area is considered as a sacred area and includes a war museum managed by 3 November Foundation near the parking area (image below).

Near-by Places to Visit

A walking road next to the Pasubio War Memorial takes you to a hanging bridge, also known as Tibetan Bridge, which is decorated with Buddhist flags, with beautiful views of the valley below.

Going further along the walking path after the Tibetan bridge one can reach Campo Grosso, known for its spectacular views of the Dolomite mountains.

Walking in the opposite direction towards the Pian delle Fugazze (Fugazze mountain pass) takes you to a popular resting point with the Pasubio bar-restaurant and places like Campo Silvano, Vall'Arsa and Rovereto. I especially love the charming village of Campo Silvano for its spectacular views, an antelope sanctuary and views of a water-reservoir in Vall'Arsa below.

In the End

We try to take all our guests to see the War Memorial because it is a good way to understand local history and for its beautiful views.

One evening at the Pasubio memorial, many years ago, is etched in my memory because of the wonderful colours of the setting sun on the snow-covered mountains with a full moon behind the memorial, as you can see from the image below.

 If this subject interests you, you also might like to read some of my other posts about other war memorials - War Cemeteries of Vicentino; and Remembering Soldiers - War Memorials from Around the World. 

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Life's Purpose and Seth's Mantra

Some decades ago, I was very interested in exploring ideas about death, afterlife, souls, etc. At that time, I had read a large number of books on this theme. Among those books, there were some by an American writer called Jane Roberts, which had a lasting impact on me.

Recently, by chance I found some of those old Jane Roberts books that I had bought during a stay in the USA in the early 1990s. They reminded me about that period of my life when I was utterly taken up by their ideas.

I also discovered that Jane had died in 1984 and they have an online Seth Centre, where you can learn about those books and they have a podcast on YouTube.

This post is about the Jane Roberts' books and about some of its enduring learnings for my life.

Finding the Old Books   

My wife said that the attic is full of useless stuff, and that I should go up and take a good look at it and decide if there is anything worth keeping, otherwise one day she will throw away everything. I know my wife, she does not make empty threats. She did throw away things from my cupboard, after telling me a couple of times to clean it.

So yesterday, I went to the attic. Our attic is underneath sloping roofs, so it is difficult to reach the stuff along the walls (roof is so low at the sides that I need to almost crawl to reach there). It was along one of the walls that I found a plastic bag full of old books, that some ten years ago, I had told myself that I will sort them and decide which ones to keep.

In that bag, I found some Jane Roberts' books, that brought back so many memories. One of the memory was of a cryptic motto, "Why did I Ask for This?", that I had as screensaver on my old computer and which was my mantra for dealing with any challenge.

Jane Roberts' Books About Seth

Jane Roberts and her husband Robert F. Butts had written 8 books in the 1980s - Seth Speaks, The Nature of Personal Reality, Adventures in Consciousness, The Nature of the Psyche, The Seth Material, and 3 volumes of The Unknown reality.

Jane was a medium-writer, writing in a state of trance. She used to channel an "essence or a personality" called Seth, who was defined as "an intelligence no longer focused in physical reality, who has communicated with our world through writer Jane Roberts. During Roberts' trance-like states, Seth has revealed to her startling secrets about life, death, the universe beyond the five senses, and an amazing potential within us that is just waiting to be tapped."

My Ideas About Soul, Life and Afterlife

Like everyone, I had also wondered occasionally about the purpose of our lives - why do we have an conscience and how are we supposed to live our lives. I had lost my father when I was 21 and though I was not new to the idea of death, his sudden death had raised many questions in my mind about souls, what happens to it at death, and what, if anything, is afterlife.

When I was 16, I had once taken part in a seance at a neighbour's house. There were six of us. We had put our fingers on an upside-down empty glass on a chart on which boxes were drawn, with an alphabet in those boxes. We had held hands and invoked a spirit, asking it to come and help us find answers to our questions. I was very surprised when after each question, the glass had moved on the chart, pointing to a "yes" or a "no". I think that it was some kind of self-hypnotism that had made our fingers subtly move that glass, and it was not a real spirit inside it!

I had also tried looking at some of the religious books and their ideas about death. The biblical ideas of heaven and hell, followed by resurrection and restoration of the dead did not convince me. Similar Islamic ideas about angels of death judging my beliefs, etc. seemed equally unconvincing to me. I like some of the Hindu ideas in the Upanishads about our souls being a fragment of God and that after death, that soul reunites with the whole essence of god, but have many doubts about some other beliefs such as those of individual souls that keep their individual essence and may even take rebirth. 

Seth's Views About Purpose of Life

The Jane Roberts' books, touch on a wide variety of subjects such as - ways of looking at past lives, out of body experiences, astral projections, how probable realities combine to create our waking lives, how to explore our own unknown reality, and so on.

Reading these books, provoked a lot of reflections in me about souls and afterlives. Almost thirty years later, I can still recall my fascination with some of those ideas. However, I continue to be sceptical about survival of individual souls and their afterlife. I would rather think of a Seth as an expression of the life energy as a whole.

Seth's Mantra for Me 

Yet, there is one idea from these books that had a huge impact on me and in some ways continues to influence me even today. In one of the books, Seth talked about the purpose of life as the soul taking a life-form so that it could experience certain aspects of material life. It said that before taking birth, the soul decides what kinds of challenges it would like to face in that life. Thus, people being born with challenges or facing specific challenging events in their lives, are souls that need to experience those challenges in order to learn facing and overcoming them.

For me this idea means that everything that happens to me, good or bad, happens because I chose that as a challenge for my life. So every time, I face a challenge, I ask myself: Why did I choose this? What am I going to learn from it? What can I do to overcome it?

In Conclusion 

I tried to share this idea with my friends but it did not always work. For example, when a close friend broke his leg in an accident, and I went to see him at the hospital, I suggested that it might have been a challenge he had chosen for himself. He became very upset saying that it didn't make sense to him that he had chosen all that pain and suffering. 

However, I think that it is good way to face life. Giving up on a challenge and accepting defeat means that we did not give our soul a chance to learn from that experience.

For about 3 decades, I worked in international development programmes with marginalised communities in different countries of Asia, Africa and S. America. One of the approaches which I liked using in my work was called "emancipatory research", where the focus was on helping persons to look at their challenges as barriers and to facilitate them to collectively think of ways to emancipate themselves. I feel that in a way, the "emancipatory research" approach reflected the same basic idea of Seth.

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