Gervaso rests next to D’Annunzio, ashes at the Vittoriale

The writer and journalist Roberto Gervaso, who died in Milan on 2 June 2020 at the age of 82, rests next to Gabriele D’Annunzio in the funeral mausoleum of the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the Vate house-museum on the Brescia side of Lake Garda. In recent days the ashes have been moved from the Sacrofano cemetery, near Rome, to Gardone Riviera: the burial ceremony was held today, in a strictly private form. “It was a simple private ceremony, as he would have liked: with the raising of the flag and the silence played by a trumpeter,” Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the Il Vittoriale degli Italiani Foundation, of which Gervaso was councilor, told AdnKronos of administration since 2010. At the burial ceremony were present his wife Vittoria and daughter Veronica, and a small group of relatives and friends, including the entrepreneur Marco Bonometti, president of Confindustria Lombardia, the screenwriter and television author Pier Francesco Pingitore and the journalist Sandro Neri, editor of the newspaper “Il Giorno”. The funeral monument placed in the Vittoriale park was finished in 1963, 25 years after the death of d’Annunzio, and now houses the urn together with those of ten companions chosen by him: among them Riccardo Gigante, mayor of Fiume in 1919-20. Below, inside a circular chapel, Giordano Bruno Guerri has decided to honor the remains of men and women linked to the Vittoriale: after the anthropologist Ida Magli and Giuseppe Sarti, one of the pilots of the flight over Vienna, the Mausoleum has welcomed now Roberto Gervaso, known as aphorist and author with Indro Montanelli of six volumes of the “History of Italy” published by Bur Rizzoli. Guerri explained: “I met Roberto Gervaso in the early eighties, together with Indro Montanelli. the conversation, which he conducted like his aphorisms, savory and sharp. I would never have thought of finding him one day on a board of directors. It was in 2010, for my second term as president of the Vittoriale degli Italiani, and it was a joy. I would never have thought that one day I would have organized his entombment at the Vittoriale. He would certainly have written us a magnificent aphorism, it is a pity not to be able to imagine it “. After the announcement of the entombment of Gervaso in l Vittoriale, President Guerri has received numerous requests from private citizens so that the ashes of their relatives can be kept in the park of the Vate house-museum. For this Guerri specifies and warns: “To have this privilege you must have had a very strong institutional bond with the Vittoriale or with the figure of d’Annunzio. Soon the Vittoriale will prepare to welcome the ashes of Antonio Gottardo, the young machine gunner sergeant who he died when the cannon shots were fired in the government building in Fiume in the ‘Bloody Christmas’ of 1920. (by Paolo Martini)