Alessandro Pirzio Biroli was an Italian Army General and fencer. At the 1908 London Olympics he won a silver medal in the team sabre behind Hungary. After World War I he became the commanding officer for the Bersaglieri Regiment and between 1921-27 headed a military mission to Ecuador. He was also commander of the Monte Nero Division and led the Italian 5th Trieste Corps. From 1936-37 he was Chief of Staff in the Eritrean Corps in the Second Italo-Abyssinian war.
With Fascist sympathies, Pirzio Biroli was made General of the Italian 9th Army in 1941 and was Governor of Montenegro from 1941-43, holding complete civil and military powers. Pirzio Biroli was personally responsible for numerous executions and the mass terror of Montenegro’s population. Despite being considered a war criminal by the United Nations, he was never tried and spent his last years in Roma where he died in 1962 at 84-years-old.
