The Battle of Monte Cassino was actually a series of four intense and sometimes controversial battles that took place between January 20 and May 18, 1944, culminating at a 1,300-year-old Benedictine monastery on the top of the 1,100 metre Monte Cassino in southern Italy. After the successful Allied landings in Italy in September 1943 a route was needed from the Allied position north of Naples to Rome, and the only way through was via the Liri Valley. Blocking the valley was a mass of German-occupied hills around the town of Cassino. Involving British, US, French, North African, New Zealand, Ghurkha and Polish troops, fierce battles raged against the Germans on a slow and brutal advance towards the monastery, whose eventual capture would give the Allied forces the access they needed to open the road to Rome. At a cost of over 25,000 lives including the deaths by heavy allied bombing on February 15 of a number of Italian civilians who were taking refuge in the monastery, the final battle ended on the morning of May 18 when a reconnaissance group of soldiers from the Polish 12th Podolian Uhlans Regiment finally reached what was by then an empty and completely devastated monastery. The Battle of Monte Cassino paved the way for the Allied advance on Rome, which fell on June 4, 1944, two days before the Normandy invasion, and is one of Poland’s proudest military achievements. On May 18, 1999, exactly 55 years after the event, an 8.5-metre monument designed by the Polish sculptor Gustaw Zemła was unveiled in a small park just north of the (A-2) Archaeological Museum. Resembling the outline of Italy with a number of eerie, battle-related elements built into it, the monument also features a pair of wings, supposedly representing Nike and the Polish Hussars.