On top of the column stands a bronze eagle with a broken wing. It is Montemilone's war memorial, and it is the reason this park exists: unveiled in 1925 in piazza Municipio, the monument was only later moved to the villa dei Caduti, the green space the town calls the parco della Rimembranza. It came after a long run of public works — from the second half of the nineteenth century the council had paid for roads, the mother church, the cemetery, the clock tower, the telegraph and post office and the infant school — and it is the only item on that list that serves no purpose except remembering.
What to see
The memorial is a four-sided column resting on a decorated plinth, closed at the corners by four small columns. The inscription runs across the faces, and it is not just any text: it was dictated by Giustino Fortunato, the Lucanian historian and writer on the southern question, who spent his life writing about the condition of the peasants of the South.
The eagle crowning it has a broken wing. On a monument unveiled seven years after the end of the Great War, in a town that in those same years was watching its men leave for America, the detail does not go unnoticed: this is not the triumphant eagle you expect.
Visiting
It is an open public space, no ticket and no opening times, and a few minutes are enough. Walk right around the monument instead of stopping at the side you came from: the four faces do not say the same thing, and the inscription only reads if you complete the circuit.
Our editors' tip
Then go and find piazza Municipio, where the monument originally stood. In front of the old town hall rises the clock tower, the work of the engineer Pomodoro of Molfetta and inaugurated on 14 March 1882, thirty-five metres tall: it is the most visible point in town, and that is where, in 1925, the eagle had been meant to go.