Engineer and Gold Medal for Military Valour
At a glance
- Born Giovanni Tamanti at Aulla on 8 June 1909, son of Ing. Giovanni and Francesca Barluzzi. His father died when he was six and his mother when he was twelve.
- Engineering student in Rome (final year 1933); passed the state engineering examination at Naples in the 1934 session.
- Reserve lieutenant, later captain, 136th Artillery Regiment, Giovani Fascisti Division.
- Killed at Enfidaville, Tunisia, on 20 April 1943.
His story
Gianni grew up as a war orphan in the care of his grandmother Maria and followed his father into engineering. By June 1933, as a final-year student of the Rome engineering school, he won the Archbishop of Messina’s competition to design a church for an earthquake zone. Montalcino’s paper reported that the judges warmly praised the ‘progetto Tamanti’. As an engineer he built roads in Ethiopia, on the Ghibiè–Gimma route, and an airfield in Albania in 1939.
In the Second World War he served in Greece with the 14th Artillery Regiment ‘Ferrara’. In Tunisia, as a reserve lieutenant, he commanded the 2nd self-propelled anti-tank battery of the V Group, 136th Artillery, Giovani Fascisti Division. The battle of Enfidaville was the British Eighth Army’s last great offensive in North Africa, opened on the night of 19–20 April 1943; the 20th, when New Zealand troops stormed Takrouna and the Axis defenders counter-attacked along the line, was the day of the heaviest fighting. The ‘self-propelled’ guns of the Giovani Fascisti’s artillery were very probably small 65/17 mountain guns mounted on lorries rather than armoured vehicles, which makes his charge against enemy armour the more striking.
On 20 April 1943, at Enfidaville, his battery was beyond the Italian lines. On his own initiative he left his waiting position to charge superior enemy armour that was about to destroy an Italian reconnaissance unit. After the tanks were driven back, in the citation’s words, he ‘non esitava a sacrificare coscientemente la propria vita accanto ad un pezzo’, consciously sacrificing his own life beside a gun to save his battery.
He was awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour, with posthumous promotion to captain. Wikipedia dates the decree 15 March 1945; the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 1949 prints it under a decree of 31 December 1947.
The veterans of Montalcino placed a memorial on the palazzo on 4 November 1966, and the piazza in front bears his name.
What his death meant for the family land
Gianni was the heir of the senior Tamanti line, the line of Dr. Antonio that had reunited the family’s farms. His father had been killed in 1916, and when Gianni fell in 1943 his brother Leonardo was in East Africa without news. Leonardo survived but did not return: a British parliamentary return of 1953–54 lists ‘Tamanti, Leonardo’, Italian, naturalised in the Somaliland Protectorate on 22 December 1952, and the Colonial Office List for 1950 names ‘L. Tamanti’ as Senior Road Superintendent of the Protectorate’s Public Works Department: like his father and brother, a builder of roads (a very probable identification). After the war the family no longer lived in Montalcino and, as the historian Lucia Carle records, sold its substantial landholdings, in the years just before Brunello made Montalcino’s vineyards valuable. His sister Giuliana’s share, the Il Casato estate, passed into the Colombini family of Fattoria dei Barbi and today’s Casato Prime Donne. The wars are a large part of the answer to why there is no Tamanti winery today.
Contributions and honours
- 1933: winner of the Archbishop of Messina’s church-design competition.
- Engineer of roads in Ethiopia and of an airfield in Albania (1939).
- Gold Medal for Military Valour, Enfidaville (decree of 1945 or 31 December 1947).
- Commemorated by the palazzo memorial (1966), Piazza Giovanni Tamanti, and a plaque on the Strada degli Artiglieri at Rovereto.
Still to find
His degree record in Rome; the date of the medal decree; the full biography in Le Medaglie d’oro al Valor Militare, vol. II (1965), p. 784; his grave.
Sources
Presidenza della Repubblica, Onorificenze: Tamanti Gianni, Medaglia d’oro al Valor Militare; Gazzetta Ufficiale, 7 April 1936, no. 81 (state examination, Naples); Gazzetta Ufficiale, supplement no. 228, 4 October 1949; Il Progresso (Montalcino) 1933 no. 11; Storia dell’Artiglieria, vol. 16; Wikipedia, ‘Battle of Enfidaville’ and ‘136th Armored Division “Giovani Fascisti”’; ‘Giovani Fascisti: the “Young Fascists”’, wargaming.info (65/17 guns on lorries); it.wikipedia, ‘Gianni Tamanti’; memorial plaque, Palazzo Tamanti.
This page is one of ten family-leader profiles drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 1.39, October 2026), where every fact carries a full archival reference. It will be enlarged as new records are found. See also Giovanni and Gianni Tamanti. All ten family leaders.