Gorla Little Martyrs Memorial

On 20^th October 1944, Allied aircraft took off from southern Italy to strike the Breda steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni. Possibly due to a routing mistake, they dropped about 80 tonnes of explosives on the working-class neighbourhoods of Gorla and Precotto. In Gorla, 184 Francesco Crispi primary school pupils and 19 teachers and staff lost their lives when a bomb hit the school. In Lombardy’s capital alone, the bombing that day resulted in 641 victims, along with other air raids intended to demolish the Isotta Fraschini and Alfa Romeo production plants.

On the massacre site, there is now a square named after the Little Martyrs of Gorla, featuring an ossuary monument in the centre designed by sculptor Remo Brioschi in the 1950s. The bronze statue depicts a mother holding the body of a child with an inscription that reads ‘Here comes the war’ and the date 20/10/1944 behind her. In the latter half of the 1950s, the bones of the students and teachers who died in the tragedy were moved into the crypt.