Giuseppe Perrucchetti

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Giuseppe Domenico Perrucchetti (13 July 1839 - 1916, was an Italian general and politician, the creator of the Alpini corp.

He was born in Cassano d'Adda, in what is now the province of Milan in Lombardy. He studied architecture in the university of Pavia, but when he was 20 he fled from Lombardy (at the time under Austrian domination) to enroll in the Piedmont army. He was a volunteer in the Second Italian Independence War and in the 1866 war against Austria, where he gained a silver medal in the battle of Custoza.

He was a Captain in 1872, when he proposed the creation of the Alpini corp, in a brilliant article published on the Italian military journal "Rivista Militare Italiana". Perrucchetti drew examples from the mountain militias in the Roman age, the “Cacciatori delle Alpi” brigades, and the Volontari Cadorini led by Pier Fortunato Calvi.

Later he became a General, and a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. But ironically, Perucchetti never became an Alpino, nor he commanded the corps he genially invented. He died in 1916, when the Alpini were creating a legend for themselves in the Alps and in Africa during World War I.