The imposing bulk of the Altare della Patria, the monument erected in memory of King Victor Emmanuel II and for this reason also known as the Vittoriano, dominates historic Piazza Venezia, the heart of Rome. To make way for the vast marble building , construction began in 1885 by Giuseppe Sacconi, following a public competition, announced in 1882, which also established the location of the monument in the extensive area under the Campidoglio , a good part of the Capitoline Hill was sacrificed and therefore palazzos, monuments and old roads disappeared. A symbol and summary of Italian history, inspired by Hellenistic architecture, the Altare della Patria, inaugurated by Victor Emmanuel III in 1911, has a great colonnaded portico surmounted by two colossal teams of four horses , created in bronze by Carlo Fontana and Paolo Bartolini, and by four statues of winged Victory. Preceded by a huge flight of steps flanked by bronze statues, personifications of Thought and Action and two fountains representing the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas, the colossal monument has, at the centre, an imposing equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II, by Enrico Chiaradia. The edifice contains the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, one of the unnamed fallen in the First World War, whose remains were placed here in 1921, dominated by the statue of the goddess Roma, in the semblance of Minerva, the work of Angelo Zanelli. Finally, a procession of statues adorn the complex, fourteen of them representing Italian cities, the fine work of Eugenio Maccagnani, while sixteen of them portray the Italian regions, as well as friezes and high relief work.