Spring of Heroes! If 99 years ago I had had to give a title to the battle of Pozzuolo del Friuli I would have named it this way and not only because I would have wanted to establish a clear antithesis with the season in which the battle took place, the gray Friulian autumn, but also because of the spring that fight had all the mythical characteristics.
The pagans believed that in spring Persephone would return to the world of the living in her splendid youth, going back from the underworld, to which an unclean promise had forced her and so it was for those heroes of Pozzuolo, young shoots on horseback who will climb the slope of defeat, the underworld of Caporetto. Heroic and courageous people like Proserpina, knights determined to face the mists of winter like the flames of hell, young shoots one with their steed and the myth, the ideal of the Centaurs, of those who made Achilles the foot fast, a Centaur precisely and then between small houses of a Friuli village the mythology becomes reality: Genoa and Novara, Lanza di Montezemolo and Lajolo, the commander Emo, the colonel Campari and the thousand names who fought twenty-four hours without stopping, not only to curb an enemy stronger in number and means, but above all to stand up as a warning to future generations, so that the spring idea of going up against the current, against the mass, in the eternal opposition between the mediocre reality of the many and the vigorous and youthful hero myth.
99 years have passed and as the rite of memory is repeated every year, those knights return to gallop to make us aware of their sacrifice made in favor of a higher good and interest, values without names, or flags and which can be summarized with a single concept: respect for the given word, perhaps the only real great thrust that can lead to hell and then from there resurrect the individual to the empyrean of heroes.
Also this year the sequence of celebrations and ceremonies ended, at the end of the flashing of sabers and the beating of the heels a heartfelt scream echoes from the sky of the Invitti: For the glories of Italy, for the memory of the fallen, a spring and mythical, Caricat!
(photo: Touring Club Italiano)
