The road of tunnels was built in 1917, between February and December, in order to serve the Pasubio front. The great protagonists were the miners of the 33rd Company (later integrated with other teams), after its Commanding Officer, Lieutenat Zappa, was given the task of evaluating its feasibility.
The company was at the time involved in the fortification works on the crest of Monte Alba, not far from Bocchetta Campiglia where the road would have to start. It was the end of January, right in the middle of one of the coldest and snowiest winters of the century: on the Pasubio, rising before the eyes of the company, there were meters and meters of snow. The road would have to face the mountain, climbing up the rocky and apparently inaccessible crests of the Bella Laita in order to arrive, following a route hidden to the enemy artillery, that went through Forni Alti and the Passo di Fontana d’Oro, reaching Porte del Pasubio. At the start there was no plan, just a vague indication, because “given the rocky and jagged nature of the terrain, of which no surveys or maps existed, it wasn’t possible to pre-emptively establish a route”.
Zappa accepted the task and – Lieutanant Cassina wrote – “he decide to proceed upward little by little and also to build a trail at the same time, rising up ahead of the road in order to study the later layout. The main objective we had, – Cassina continues -, was that of reaching the crest of the rocky mountainside that was rising dramatically in front of Bocchetta Campiglia. Then we would have decided how to proceed. In fact we knew we had to reach Forni Alti and the Passo di Fontana d’Oro, but we didn’t have the slightest idea of how to reach it, because the Bella Laita, which we had to cross, was inaccessible.”
And so begins the epic of the road construction. It will require a profound involvement of all those involved, but especially of the officers. For them it will be a mission, and an adventure of doing, of risking, of being young. This is felt on every page of Lieutenant Cassina’s “memories”, written at the end of the war, and that constitute del thread holding the exhibition together. The sense of something unknown, of exploration, of questioning the mountain in order to find a way through, the challenge of having to find a solution time after time, in order to force that same mountain with a road. Bu also the proud awareness of having become in time a team, that was able to give itself a strong work method, founded on the division and sharing of tasks.
When in April, with the Pasubio still covered in snow, Lieutenant Zappa received the order of transfer to another post, the road had already arrived at the height of the thirteenth tunnel: at its exit, on an overhanging cliff, the arrival station of the manual cableway had been planted. At the same time the exploration trail had arrived even higher, right under the mountain wall inside of which the nineteenth and twentieth spiral-shaped tunnels would rise, the longest and riskiest ones: right on the side the advanced base camp was, in the meantime, being set up.
Cassina will write: “The master was leaving but at that point we had become somewhat expert; the road had seduced us and had seduced the NCOs and soldiers as well. I still remember with intense emotion the commitment taken officially by us soldiers, gathered in the mess hall of Bocchetta Campigli the night after Zappa’s departure. We didn’t know who would be sent to replace him and we were scared of being distracted from our construction.”
Captain Picone will be the one to substitute Lieutenant Zappa and to complete the road, with the same amount of passion and energy.
The road is 6300 meters long: 2300 meters are of tunnels, the rest are dug out of the rock on the hillside. It starts at 1216 mt of altitude and finishes at 1928 mt, for a total difference in altitude, counting the ups and downs of the first section, of 784 meters. It is considered a masterpiece of war engineering.
Its construction, which started on the 29th of January with a first platoon of twenty men, ended up employing, once the snow melted and summer began, six hundred men. Forty compressed air drills were then in use whose distribution, thorough a net of big tubes, coming from the central point of distribution, built at the foot of the mountain, covered the whole trail.
In the ten months of work the 33rd Company suffered four casualties.