Redipuglia and the Carso of the Great War, from Gorizia

Getting there

From Gorizia you reach Redipuglia by way of Gradisca d'Isonzo, or with the link road to Villesse and the A4 as far as the Redipuglia exit. At the Sacrario you park opposite, in the large free open space next to the station; to Monte San Michele you climb from San Martino del Carso, the road the museum also recommends to coaches. There is no official overnight stop at the Sacrario: the nearest with water filling and emptying is the Comune's area at Gradisca d'Isonzo.

• The Sacrario car park is piazzale Papa San Giovanni Paolo I, in via Terza Armata, unsurfaced and free, between the Sacrario and Redipuglia station: motorhomes and coaches fit there too, and on the open space is the little hut of the Pro Loco's tourist office. On the day of the 4 November ceremony the car parks around the Sacrario are divided into areas for the authorities and the units, and it is best to arrive early or come by train
• The Colle Sant'Elia is right in front of the Sacrario, on the other side of the road, and you climb it on foot in a few minutes; the Austro-Hungarian cemetery of Fogliano is about a kilometre away, along the road to Fogliano, just after the village cemetery: you go on foot or move the motorhome
• The Dolina del XV Bersaglieri and Monte Sei Busi are behind the Sacrario: take the road to Doberdò del Lago and after about two and a half kilometres there is a small signposted car park, from which you climb on foot
• Monte San Michele: from Redipuglia head towards Sagrado and climb to San Martino del Carso; from piazza della Fontana via Zona Sacra leads to the museum's open space, at the top. On the Sagrado side there is another road, which crosses the Ungaretti park and the Castelvecchio estate and runs for about two kilometres to the Area delle Battaglie, the battle area, with a small car park near the Trincea delle Frasche: with a long motorhome the San Martino road is better. On foot, from San Martino, CAI path 73 reaches the museum in about ten minutes
• The lake of Doberdò is reached from the road to Doberdò del Lago; the Gradina visitor centre is on the hill above the lake, at via Vallone 32
• To sleep: the Comune's motorhome area at Gradisca d'Isonzo, in viale Trieste, about ten minutes from the Sacrario and from San Michele, is a small free car park with three bays for motorhomes, water filling and emptying, lit, with stays of up to 48 hours; it has no electricity and no toilets. It is between a supermarket and a filling station, and the centre of Gradisca, with the Venetian fortress, is about a kilometre away

Practical information

Start in the morning with the Sacrario and the Colle Sant'Elia, pass by Fogliano, and in the afternoon climb to San Michele, whose museum is open only on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays: anyone who comes on another day sees the trenches and the marker stones, but not the gun gallery, unless they book the visit. On the Carso it is very hot in summer and there is little shade; in winter the bora blows.

Contacts

Where it is

Redipuglia · Friuli-Venezia Giulia

You set off from

Notes

• The Sacrario, according to the Ministry of Defence, on the page read in October 2026, is a sacred place that is always open, like the park of the Colle Sant'Elia, and it is free. The two rooms at the top of the stairway, the hall of the Gold Medals and the hall of remembrance, have their own hours: from 1 November to 14 March Tuesday to Saturday from 9:00 to 14:00 and from 14:30 to 16:00, closed on Mondays, Sundays and public holidays; from 15 March to 31 October Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 14:00 and from 14:30 to 16:00, on Saturdays and Sundays from 9:00 to 12:30 and from 13:30 to 18:00. It is looked after by the Ministry of Defence, with its office for the protection of culture and memory
• How it is built: at the entrance the stairway is closed off by a heavy anchor chain, from the torpedo boat Grado, which had been Austro-Hungarian. Then comes the open space paved with Carso stone, crossed by the Via Eroica between two rows of bronze plaques bearing the names of the places of the hardest battles. At the end, on its own, the tomb of the Duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, who died in 1931 and asked to be buried here among his soldiers: a block of porphyry weighing 75 tonnes, with at its sides the urns of five of his generals, Chinotto, Monti, Paolini, Prelli and Riccieri
• The twenty-two terraced steps rise behind the tomb, with the named fallen in alphabetical order, from bottom to top, each with his bronze plaque. On all of them is written PRESENTE, present, the answer to the roll call of comrades in arms, which in the years of the regime was also the cry of the Fascist rallies. In the front row is the only woman, the Red Cross nurse Margherita Kaiser Parodi, who died at 21: her plaque has a large carved cross. At the top, at the sides of the chapel, are the two common tombs of the more than sixty thousand unknown, and from the terrace you can see the Carso as far as the sea
• The chapel at the top holds objects of the Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers; since 3 September 2014 it has been a church, dedicated to Mary Queen of Peace, and on display there is the head of a Christ found in 1995 in the dolina dei Cinquecento, on the Sei Busi, where it adorned the cross above a mass grave
• The Colle Sant'Elia is the Parco della Rimembranza, the park of remembrance: along the avenue of cypresses there are thirty artillery pieces and thirty-five marker stones of Carso stone, with the epitaphs and the relics that stood on the graves of the first cemetery, made of helmets, mess tins, pieces of barbed wire. At the top, in place of the chapel and lighthouse of those days, a Roman column from the excavations of Aquileia remembers the fallen of all wars
• The Casa della Terza Armata, at the foot of the Colle Sant'Elia, houses the Sacrario's historical museum, with rooms of weapons, uniforms and war mementoes: according to the Ministry of Defence the museum rooms are closed for works, and there is no reopening date. In the basement there is a bar-restaurant, and behind it a room for packed lunches and the toilets, always open
• In via Terza Armata, next to the car park, the Pro Loco runs the tourist office and a small multimedia museum of the Great War, at number 37; from the office leave the guided tours with Great War experts and the excursions of the Sentieri di pace, the paths of peace (telephone 0481 489139)
• The Austro-Hungarian cemetery of Fogliano: a long avenue of cypresses leads to the great central tomb, where seven thousand unknown soldiers lie; another five thousand are in two common tombs along the boundary wall, and the 2,550 soldiers with names each have a small marker stone. They were men of all the nations of the empire, and over the gateway is written "Im Leben und im Tode vereint", united in life and in death
• The Dolina del XV Bersaglieri is an open-air museum inaugurated in 2000, between the Sacrario and Monte Sei Busi, at 118 metres: in the doline, the karst hollow, are the remains of the small field hospital, the traces of the huts and of a mass grave, and climbing towards the summit the Italian trenches and the reinforced concrete defence line of the Sei Busi, the hill fought over in the first, second and fourth battles of the Isonzo
• Monte San Michele, 275 metres, has four summits side by side, and it overlooked the lower Isonzo valley and Gorizia: for this reason the Austro-Hungarians fortified it with caves and guns, and defended it until August 1916. The outdoor route goes round the four summits among the marker stones of the brigades and regiments, among them those of the Sassari brigade, of Filippo Corridoni and of the Hungarian 4th Honvéd regiment; you pass through the Schönburg tunnel, near Cima 2, and going down by the cave of the Austro-Hungarian general Lukachich. Cima 3 is less than a minute on foot from the museum, and from the open space you see the Collio, Gorizia and, on clear days, the Alps and the sea
• The San Michele museum, run by the Comune of Sagrado, according to the museum, read in October 2026, is open on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, from April to October from 10:00 to 18:00 and from November to March from 10:00 to 16:00; on other days it opens by booking. The ticket for the museum and the gun gallery costs 8 euros, 5 euros for young people; the gun gallery only 3 euros, 2 euros reduced; virtual reality 10 euros, 6 euros reduced; the complete visit 15 euros, 10 euros reduced. For each parent who pays a full ticket, one child up to 14 gets into the museum and the gun gallery free, and up to 5 entry is free. Inside, the Lukachich cave reconstructed in 3D and a 360-degree virtual reality room, with fifteen stations, that brings the gas attack back to life
• The gun gallery of Cima 3, dug by the Italians between October 1916 and June 1917 after the conquest, was the tactical headquarters of the Third Army: it can be visited during the museum's hours. Along the outdoor route, at five points, the museum's augmented reality can be seen on your phone, with the ticket
• The Trincea delle Frasche is a stretch of trench on the side of San Michele, about a kilometre along the road to Sagrado, where the first three battles of the Isonzo were fought in the summer and autumn of 1915; not far away, the remains of an Italian trench mark the place of the gas attack
• San Martino del Carso, a hamlet of Sagrado, was on the front line from 1915 and was destroyed by the bombs. Giuseppe Ungaretti fought on San Michele for months, and here he wrote many poems of Il Porto Sepolto, among them "San Martino del Carso" ("Of these houses nothing is left but a few shreds of wall"): the poem can be read in piazza della Fontana. In the village there is a small museum of the caving group and the private museum "Memorie della Grande Guerra", memories of the Great War
• The lake of Doberdò is a karst lake that fills and empties from underground, with no rivers feeding it, inside the regional nature reserve of the lakes of Doberdò and Pietrarossa, 726 hectares between Doberdò del Lago, Monfalcone and Ronchi dei Legionari. On the hill of Castellazzo, above the lake, are the remains of a Bronze Age hill fort and the Gradina visitor centre, with a museum on the nature and history of the Carso, the First World War included (telephone 0481 784111)
• On 4 November, National Unity and Armed Forces Day, every year at the Sacrario there is the ceremony with the highest officers of the State, the guard of honour, the units drawn up on the terraced steps and the laurel wreath for the fallen, at about 11:00. In 2026, on Wednesday 4 November, the Region and FS Treni Turistici Italiani run the historic Great War train from Trieste, with an electric locomotive and carriages from the 1930s: it leaves Trieste Centrale at 7:40, passes Monfalcone at 8:12 and arrives at Redipuglia at 8:23, and leaves Redipuglia again at 15:45. The return trip costs 10 euros, 5 euros from 4 to 12, and under 4 you travel free without a seat; tickets are bought from Trenitalia. After the ceremony there are guided tours of the Sacrario and the Colle Sant'Elia, from the tourist office hut in the car park, and the soldier's rancio, the army meal, to be booked at the tourist office
• In winter the Sacrario is always open, the rooms at the top only Tuesday to Saturday, and the San Michele museum closes at 16:00. The bora on the Carso can be very strong: with a high motorhome drive carefully on the open roads of Doberdò and San Michele

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