14 Facts About Enrico Caviglia

Enrico Caviglia was a distinguished officer in the Italian Army.

In 1912 Enrico Caviglia was sent to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica; his task was to oversee both the negotiations for the pullout of Turkish troops resulting from the Italo-Turkish War and the pacification of Arab and Berber chieftains.

When in 1915 Italy entered the First World War against Austria-Hungary, Enrico Caviglia was made major general.

On 14 June 1917 Enrico Caviglia was promoted to lieutenant general for his merits on the battlefield: in August, as commanding officer of XXIV Army Corps, he overran the Austro-Hungarians on the Bainsizza plateau, the most brilliant Italian advance in the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo.

Enrico Caviglia was transferred to serve as commander of X Army Corps.

September 1918 saw Enrico Caviglia being made a titular commander of army corps by war merits, and by November he had been put in charge of the new 8th Army, which decisively crushed the crumbling Austro-Hungarian forces at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto.

When Gabriele D'Annunzio occupied Fiume with his "legionnaires", Enrico Caviglia was called to replace general Pietro Badoglio, dating from 21 December 1920, as troop commander and extraordinary commissioner in the Venezia Giulia.

On 25 June 1926, Enrico Caviglia was appointed Marshal of Italy.

Enrico Caviglia thus became a 'cousin' of King Victor Emmanuel III.

In 1943, from 8 to 13 September, as the King's court fled the incoming Germans after surrendering the country to the Allies, the aged Enrico Caviglia had to take the military command in Rome and to negotiate with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring the surrender of the capital in exchange for the respect of its theoretical status as open city.

Enrico Caviglia eventually retired to his villa, named Villa Vittorio Veneto, in Finale Ligure, to die just a month before the end of World War II.

Enrico Caviglia's body was interred in the Basilica of St John the Baptist in Finale Ligure Marina, but on 22 June 1952, under the eyes of Luigi Einaudi, President of the Italian Republic, and former prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, his remains were finally reinterred in the tower of Capo San Donato, just east of Finale.

Enrico Caviglia left a diary, which documented the evolution of his thought on many subjects, his skepticism about the Fascist regime, his confusion about what was going on in World War II and the world that he could no longer recognize.

Enrico Caviglia left military memoirs and geographical treatises and works.