Cappella Espiatoria

The memorial stands in the exact point in which, the 29 July 1900, the anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated the king Humbert I of Savoy at the end of a sporting event. To honour his memory, his son and successor Victor Emmanuel III entrusted the project to Giuseppe Sacconi - already famous architect of the Vittoriano in Rome - who designed a monument full of allegories, inaugurated in 1910 with the probable approval of Queen Mother Margaret.

The structure is distinguished by the richness of its symbolic details: at the top of the column stands a Pieta in bronze, large alabaster crosses and the royal insignia, including the sceptre and crown. The plinth encloses a chapel decorated with mosaics, under which a crypt where a black marble memorial marks the exact spot of the bombing. The homage to the Queen Margaret also emerges in the decorative apparatus, where the daisy flower recurs as a distinctive sign, taken up even in the majestic fence gate forged by Alessandro Mazzucotelli, internationally renowned master of wrought iron.