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From Napoleon to the First World War
New rooms in the War Museum |
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On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War, the War Museum of Rovereto has opened three new rooms showing the evolution of weaponry and soldiers from Napoleon to the First World war. They invite visitors to think in a new way on a matter which was crucial to the development of Italian and European citizen’s identity.
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New and more powerful weapons were invented: machine-guns, armoured, artillery able to shoot tens kilometres far, lethal gas.
Hundred years separate the end of the Wars of Napoleon from the storm that passed through Europe between 1915 and 1918: throughout this period Europe and the entire world underwent a great transformation.
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Everything changed, politics, society, economy, the relations between countries and nations and also the way of fighting War passing from flint, muzzle-loading fire-arms and one shot guns, to the breech loading and repeating rifles.
The flight and the air war was experienced for the first time. States felt increasingly powerful and million of soldiers killed each others as never before had happened. |
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Weaponry and soldiers in the nineteenth century
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The first room exhibits a great collection of items illustrating the transformation of War and weapons from Napoleon to the First World War.
On display are uniforms of the nineteenth century, flint guns, the first breech-loading weapons, the machine-gun of the American War of Secession, the Austro-Hungarian artillery of the first fortresses built in Trentino; the torpedo produced at the end of the nineteenth century by the Whithehead Company in Fiume.
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“Risorgimento” (Unification of Italy) in the living room
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The nineteenth century was also the period of the Italian “Risorgimento” whose history is told in the second room thanks to Anna H. and Romain Rainero’s donation of ceramics, paintings and objects celebrating military episodes and characters such as Mazzini and Cavour, Vittorio Emanuele II, Umberto I and Queen Margherita, Napoleon III and Francis Joseph I.
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A Great War. 1914-1918
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The third room shows why the 1914-1918 conflict was also called the "Great War": the industrial effort and the mobilization of millions of men and women to the front, in factories and in the countryside; the development of Aviation and new media; the revolution caused by the propaganda campaign; the violence against civilians, the invention of new terrible weapons, the massacres and genocide, and the mourning for the millions of deaths.
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The room leads visitors to the Great War showing its development and the events concerning Trentino and its inhabitants.
This room exhibits a rare Nieuport 10 airplane completely restored, Vintage film images - reworked by directors Gianikian Yervant and Angela Ricci Lucchi - shows the aviator’s look that for the first time experienced the vision of the earth from the sky.
From that point the traditional layout of the Museum continues with the unfolding history of the Great War. |
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