Altare della Patria

Victor Emmanuel II died on 9 January 1878, and on 26 March the deputy Francesco Perroni Paladini put a bill before the Chamber for a permanent monument to him in Rome; a government bill to the same end passed on 16 May 1878 by 211 votes to 10. A Royal Commission was set up on 13 September 1880 and opened an international competition ten days later. Eight million lire of public money was voted, with a subscription open to all Italians, including emigrants.

Three hundred and eleven competitors entered and the Frenchman Henri-Paul Nénot won, but nothing was built: critics objected that a foreigner should not design a monument to so prominent a figure of Italian history, and his scheme was later found to be a lightly updated version of his 1877 Sorbonne project. A second competition, which fixed both the site and the character of the building, closed on 9 February 1884 with ninety-eight proposals. Unable to choose between the designs of Bruno Schmitz, Manfredo Manfredi and Giuseppe Sacconi, the commission held a third contest limited to those three and awarded it to Sacconi on 24 June 1884.

The commission settled the monument on the northern slope of the Capitoline Hill; members who had argued against the site resigned at once, worried about the destruction of historic and artistic remains that building there required. Between late 1884 and 1899 the site was cleared by expropriation and extensive demolition of buildings laid out on a medieval street plan. Sacconi was given direction of the works by royal decree of 30 December 1884, the site opened on 1 January 1885, and the foundation stone was laid on 22 March 1885 before King Umberto I and Queen Margherita.

Sacconi had intended travertine, the traditional stone of ancient Rome, for most of the fabric; the price asked for Carrara marble was judged too high, and on 2 July 1889 the commission decreed Botticino marble instead, quarried near Brescia some 500 kilometres from Rome. The substitution drew criticism over the distance of the quarries.

The first excavations in 1887 found no compact tufa to build on, but river clays, sand banks, caves and old quarries far denser than expected; Sacconi had to redesign, carrying the new structures on the vaults of the tunnels.

The digging also uncovered a stretch of the Servian Wall, the city's first circuit of the 6th century BC, and the remains of a mammoth. Both were built into the walls of the rising monument without being destroyed and left inspectable. The Servian find brought a substantial change of plan: two more foundation pylons were added, and the upper portico was lengthened from 90 to 114 metres, its columns increased from sixteen to twenty.

The partly finished monument was inaugurated on 4 June 1911, at the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. The Altar of the Fatherland itself was Sacconi's addition during construction, a shrine to the goddess Roma below the equestrian statue of the king.

On 28 October 1921 Maria Bergamas of Gradisca d'Isonzo, whose only son had been killed in the First World War and whose body was never recovered, chose one of eleven unidentified bodies at Aquileia. The Unknown Soldier was carried to Rome and buried in a state funeral on 4 November 1921, in the crypt beneath the statue of Roma. From that burial the name Altare della Patria spread to the whole building. Work went on until 1935, when the monument was completed and the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento opened in it.

From the rise of Fascism in 1922 the Vittoriano was the setting for the regime's military parades. After the founding of the Italian Republic in 1946 it was stripped of all Fascist symbols and resumed its function as a secular temple to the nation. Through the second half of the 20th century its standing declined, public opinion coming to see it as a cumbersome relic, until President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pressed for a revaluation of Italy's national symbols at the turn of the 21st century.

A lift was added in 2007 to carry visitors to the roof terrace. The monument is owned by the Ministry of Culture and, since 2020, has been managed with Palazzo Venezia by the VIVE Institute; it houses the Central Museum of the Risorgimento and the Shrine of the Flags, holding the war flags of disbanded units. The tomb is watched by a guard of honour and two perpetually burning braziers, beside which a plaque reads "Italians Abroad to the Motherland", in memory of the donations made by Italian emigrants towards the building of the Vittoriano.