Comune di Solferino

A Swiss businessman once arrived in this area of Lombardy hunting for Napoleon III to discuss irrigation disputes in Algeria. Instead, he stumbled upon 40,000 casualties from the bloodiest battle since Waterloo. Henry Dunant’s 1859 encounter with the carnage in and around Solferino sparked a radical idea: nations treating enemy wounded as friends. Within four years, he’d co-founded the Red Cross, and within five, he’d helped secure the first Geneva Convention, signed by twelve nations in 1864.

Dunant’s actual relief work played out mostly in nearby Castiglione delle Stiviere, where he spent five days inside the town’s cathedral organizing local volunteers, many of them women, under the rallying phrase “Tutti fratelli,” all brothers, treating French, Sardinian, and Austrian soldiers without distinction. That distinction, choosing to help wounded enemies exactly as one would help wounded allies, is the entire idea the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions were eventually built around. Dunant himself lived to see the principle formalized twice over: first through the 1863 founding of the ICRC, then in 1901, when he became a co-recipient of the first Nobel Peace Prize ever awarded.