I spent the morning high above Gorizia in the hills surrounding the Italian village of Oslavia. Its patchwork of vineyards is part of the Collio wine region, and I watched as ribbons of autumnal mist drifted over the vines. Together with my guide Raffaella Grasselli, I was here to hike a new walking route known as the Orange Bench Trail, which links seven wine cellars. As we strolled, I saw leafless trees bright with overripe persimmons. What few roads I encountered were busier with Lycra-clad cyclists than cars.
I tried to imagine this peaceful landscape carved with trenches, as it was during the First World War. This area was even referenced in Ernest Hemingway’s wartime epic novel A Farewell to Arms, and it saw some of the most severe fighting in Italy.
I was curious about the legacies of that era, so I called in on Matej Feigl, a second-generation winemaker. His Fiegl Winery is among the collective of seven vineyards that created the trail, and visitors can drop in at their cellar doors for tastings in between hunting out notable viewpoints, where QR codes reveal more of the region’s history. I asked Matej if he still found relics of the war on his land.
“You’ll see in the cellar,” he told me, giving a wry smile. He didn’t disappoint.
Helmets, badges, flasks and grenades scattered display cases, with a row of large shells arranged alongside them on the floor. Such discoveries are common here, and Matej teased that he didn’t always bother to get the ammunition defused.
His attitude speaks to a wider tale of resilience that is told across this region. On these embattled slopes, legend has it that one of the few agricultural survivors of the war was the ribolla gialla grape variety. Its juice and macerated skins are now used to produce Oslavia’s orange wines, named for their distinctive amber hue.
Just beyond Matej’s vines lay the towering stone cylinder of the Oslavia War Memorial. It’s one of the largest First World War cemeteries in Italy, an ossuary containing the remains of thousands of soldiers, though only a fraction of them are named on the inscribed inner walls.
Mussolini opened the memorial in 1938. On the same visit, he made a speech at Trieste outlining new anti-Jewish laws, including a ban on mixed marriages, exclusion from a range of professions and loss of nationality.
“He closed the chapter on the First World War with this cemetery and opened the path to the Second World War with his speech,” my Gorizia guide Raffaella later commented.