History
From 1907 to the White War
A Royal Finance Guard barracks, the Adamello front, a mountain hut.
Origins
A barracks on the smugglers' pass
The building was raised in 1907 by the Royal Corps of Engineers as a barracks of the Royal Finance Guard, controlling the border between the Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In those years the Conca del Montozzo was a smugglers' passage between Lombardy and Trentino — tobacco, sugar, alcohol. The barracks guarded the pass, in an exposed position that in winter stayed cut off for months. When the First World War broke out the building passed to the Italian army and became an Alpini military outpost — the last command of the Kingdom of Italy before the front line.
Angelino Bozzi
The soldier the hut is named after
The hut is dedicated to Angelino Bozzi, a lieutenant of the Alpini who fell in 1916 on the Adamello front during a patrol action. The Bozzi family and the Edolo Battalion wanted his name to remain tied to these mountains: after the war the old barracks was converted into an alpine refuge and named after him, as a living memorial to the many Alpini who fought and died at altitude.
White War
The Adamello front
During the First World War the Conca del Montozzo became one of the sectors of the alpine front — the so-called White War, fought between 2000 and 3500 metres along the central Alps, from the Dolomites through the Ortles-Cevedale to the Adamello. Around 250,000 Italian soldiers and 175,000 Austro-Hungarian troops faced each other on this front; at least 30,000 died not in combat but from avalanches, cold, illness and accidents in the high mountains. The darkest day was 13 December 1916, remembered as the Day of the Avalanches: more than 10,000 soldiers were killed in 24 hours. Trenches cut into the rock, walkways, shelters, artillery positions: all around the hut you can still walk among the marks of that war, right through to the Italian victory of November 1918.
The museum next to the hut
Run by the Alpini Group of Pezzo
Next to the hut stands a small White War museum, with artefacts, photographs, weapons, everyday objects and documents recovered from the surrounding positions. The museum is curated and run by the Alpini group of Pezzo, not by the hut keepers: it is the Alpini of the village who maintain it, update it and open it to visitors. Free entry.
Ownership
A CAI hut · Brescia Section
Rifugio A. Bozzi is owned by the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), Brescia Section, which looks after its upkeep and entrusts the seasonal management to the keepers. Like all CAI huts, it is part of a historic network of mountain shelters built to support alpinism and hiking in the Alps.