As glaciers melt and shrink in the Alps of Northern Italy, long-frozen relics of World War I have been emerging from the ice.
They include cups, cans, letters, weapons and bones with the marrow sucked dry. They were found in cave barracks not far from the frigid summit of Mount Scorluzzo, which reaches more than 10,000 feet over sea level in Northern Italy, near Switzerland.
The Austro-Hungarian soldiers who occupied those barracks were fighting Italian troops in what became known as the White War. There in the Alps — removed from the more famous Western Front, a site of bloody trench warfare between Germany and France — troops climbed to precarious heights in the stinging cold to carve fortifications into the rock and snow.
The weather that tested the troops on Mount Scorluzzo ultimately preserved their barracks, freezing the entrance shut after soldiers abandoned their post at the end of the war in 1918. The structure was essentially impenetrable for decades — until 2017, when enough of the ice and snow had melted, allowing researchers to enter.
have now been excavated, revealing the items that were left behind and offering a fuller glimpse of the people who lived in the cramped space more than a century ago.
museum dedicated to the White War already exists in the nearby town Temù, and staff members there are now working to restore the relics found in the barracks.
Luca Pedrotti, a scientific coordinator at the park, said the relics held lessons in environmental science as well as history. Extremely cold weather killed soldiers in Northern Italy more than a century ago; today, warmer conditions present a different kind of threat.
Mr. Pedrotti, who lived in the park as a child, said he had watched the glaciers recede over decades. He has seen changes in the flora and observed cold-loving animals move up toward the mountaintops, clinging to habitable zones that continue to shrink.
“I think it is important that we use the park as a study area to raise awareness about climate change,” he said.