By Cristian Coletti
THE CYCLOSTORIC
Our event is joy, fun, visiting the special places of Lake Garda and its hinterland, eating well and being with friends and family.
The cyclostoric will allow participants to travel along the beautiful white roads, along the morainic hills of the lower Garda, retracing paths, villages and places of the great battle. A unique territory in Italy, where a combination of history, nature and food and wine will leave cyclists and their families speechless.
Nature fills the lungs, heart and lights up the eyes with countless beauties, dirt roads, hills, cultivated fields, vineyards, flowers and woods.
We will enter directly into the courts of the best wineries, tasting the excellence of the lower Garda wines, enjoying the excellent local cuisine with smiles, fun, music and beautiful people.
THE BATTLE
La Battaglia takes its name from the historic battle of San Martino and Solferino. It was fought on June 24, 1859 in the context of the Second Italian War of Independence by the Austrian army on one side and by the French and Piedmontese on the other.
The battle of Solferino and San Martino was the longest (about 14 hours) and also the bloodiest ever fought for independence, exceeding the number of casualties compared to Waterloo. As night falls, the Franco-Piedmontese army wins the battle, paying the price, however, of an enormous carnage: more than 300,000 men and 900 guns had clashed and the dead were more than 40,000. This carnage also upset Napoleon III himself, so much so as to induce him, on 11 July 1859, to sign the armistice at Villa Franca - Austria ceded Lombardy to Napoleon III who ceded the kingdom of Sardinia to him - with which the second war of independence ends.
It is remembered in Italy as the first concrete step towards national unity and throughout the world for having inspired Henry Dunant the idea of ​​the International Red Cross.
RED CROSS
Castiglione delle Stiviere is the closest town, six kilometers from Solferino, where there was already a hospital and the ability to access water, a key element in the improvised rescue of the nine thousand injured who, in the first three days, are transported to Castiglione.
There is also a Swiss citizen, Jean Henry Dunant, who came to meet Napoleon III for his business. He finds himself involved in the terrible carnage, aggravated by the almost non-existence of military health. He is so impressed by the situation that he decides to describe what was happening in what will later become his fundamental text: “Un Souvenir de Solferino”, translated into more than 20 languages. From the horrible spectacle the idea of ​​creating a team of trained volunteer nurses was born in Dunant, whose work could make a fundamental contribution to military health: the Red Cross.
The National Red Cross Societies were born from the Geneva Convention of 1863 (26-29 October) and the fifth to be formed is precisely the Italian one. In the 1st Geneva Diplomatic Conference, which ends with the signing of the First Geneva Convention (8-22 August 1864), the neutrality of health care facilities and personnel is sanctioned.