Pope pleads for peace

A hundred years ago, Giovanni Bergoglio fought in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War.

Luckily he survived, but his grandson Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, remembers how the old man would only speak of the 'painful memories' of the Great War.

And yesterday the pontiff made a holy pilgrimage to Italy's largest war memorial to pay homage to the sacrifices made by Giovanni and millions of others.

Standing amid row upon row of tombstones dedicated to Italian soldiers who fell during the First World War, Francis reiterated his calls for peace among nations amid new threats from the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

He recalled the trauma suffered by his own grandfather, who fought during Italy's bloody campaign along the Isonzo River, close to the graveyard, before emigrating to Argentina after the war.

The pontiff prayed among gravestones in an Austro-Hungarian cemetery, before visiting Italy's largest war memorial where he held an open-air mass beside a Fascist-era monument to 100,000 fallen soldiers.

Francis' grandfather, Giovanni Bergoglio, was one of thousands of Italians who fought in the trenches near the Isonzo River, which was part of Austria at the time, but now part of Slovenia close to the border with Italy.