Four bronzes, not a single figure: Il Sacrificio, La Gloria, La Storia, La Vittoria. Vado Ligure's war memorial carries the signature of Arturo Martini, one of the greatest Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, and dates from 1926. Martini was no outsider brought in for the commission: in April 1921 he had married Brigida Pessano, from Vado Ligure, and he stayed on for years in his wife's town, eventually setting up both his studio and his home here.
What to see
The four bronze statues announce their programme in their very titles: Sacrifice, Glory, History, Victory. The names belong to official rhetoric, but the hand is Martini's, and in those same years he was rethinking Italian sculpture from the ground up, starting again from terracotta and from the archaic. Look at the bodies and the drapery before you read the inscriptions: that is where you measure the distance between a standard-issue monument and one by a real sculptor.
A short walk away stands the sequel: the monument to Arturo Martini himself, a bronze by Roberto Bertagnin, who was the sculptor's son-in-law and pupil. Bertagnin worked from a stylised sketch by Martini, originally conceived for a monument to the aviator Arturo Ferrarin. The town, in short, repaid the sculptor in his own coin, and the two bronzes should be read together: one commissioned from an artist who was at home here, the other made to remember him.
Visiting
Vado Ligure sits on the coast between Savona and Bergeggi, on the Genoa-Ventimiglia railway, and it is a port and industrial town: the two cylindrical stacks of the power station, some 200 metres high, are visible for miles. The monument stands in the open and can be seen freely, at any hour. To fill in the picture there is the Museo Civico di Villa Groppallo, opened in 1982, which holds Roman finds from the archaeological area of Vada Sabatia and devotes a section to contemporary art and to the artists of the Premio Vado.
Our editors' tip
We would come in the raking light of late afternoon: at midday the dark bronze flattens out, while a low sun brings back the sharp volumes Martini was after. And give Villa Groppallo an extra half hour: knowing that the sculptor lived, worked and fired his terracottas here changes the way you look at the four figures. If time allows, the Civico Museo archeologico Cesare Queirolo stands on the square of the parish church of San Giovanni Battista, but it opens only on rare occasions, so ask first rather than count on it.