Cappella Espiatoria - Expiatory Chapel

Expiatory Chapel

The Expiatory Chapel rises in the place where on July 29th, 1900, at the end of a sport event, the anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated the King of Italy Umberto I of Savoy. The heir and successor Vittorio Emanuele III commissioned the architect Giuseppe Sacconi, also author of the Althar of the Motherland in Rome, to design a commemorative building rich in symbolic elements, inaugurated in 1910. On the stele there are a bronze sculpture of the Pietà, large alabaster crosses and the symbols of the Kingdom, such as the crown and the sceptre.
Inside the base of the monument, under a chapel decorated by mosaics, there is a crypt where a  black marble commemorative stone marks where the assassination occurred.

The project was probably approved by the Queen Margherita. In the decorations, we find in fact, the daisies motif, her hallmark.

The same pattern is repeated in the great gate by Alexander Mazzucotelli, "decorative blacksmith" of international renown, which delimits the area.