Milite ignoto.To the unknown soldier. On 4 November 1920, to honor all the fallen soldiers of the Great War on the anniversary of the armistice, an unusual event of long-lasting significance took place in Rome, to be remembered in the history of the country as the day of the Unknown Soldier. At the Vittoriano—that marble giant, so brazenly white, placed among the buildings of Medieval Rome—the nameless body of one of the many unknown soldiers fallen at war was buried in a small temple next to the equestrian statue of the ‘little king’ of Piedmont and the first of united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, and under the statue of the Goddess Roma. The unknown body of a man was entombed in the anonymous marble body of the city. The idea had come from Giulio Douhet, a colonel on leave and a promoter of the National Union of Officers and Soldiers. In August 1920, in the pages of Il Dovere—a weekly publication he founded and directed—he proposed that the sacrifices and the heroism of the national community during the Great War should be remembered through the body of a soldier without a name, who would thus ideally stand for all the husbands, sons and fathers who had gone missing, their remains never found. But whose remains were to be chosen? Which body, among so many unknown corpses, could be the right one to become everyone's body?