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The establishment of war ossuaries in the 19th century relates to a complex relationship between the bodies of the dead and local populations close to the battlefields, a relationship that can be brought to light through specific modes of collective burial then exhumation. At Marengo, the passion for memorialisation of a pro-Bonapartist pharmacist created a war-memorial which is part open-air ossuary, part reliquary-museum, part sacred site. The two ossuaries of Solferino and S. Martino are grounded in different political logics. They came about because of the civilian occupation of the religious spaces for mourning and memory, and result from a contamination of languages and models which transformed this counter-spacialisation of death into a locus privileging the transmission of patriotism, in an Italy that had just been unified as a Nation-State.