that proves, on 13 May 1796, on the occasion of the homonymous armistice between Napoleon and the Austrian-Piedmontese troops, with which Victor Emmanuel I of Piedmont-Sardinia ceded Nice and Savoy to France to end the war, the first mention of the Italian flag, which refers to municipal banners hoisted on three towers in the historic centre. On the document, the term "green" was subsequently crossed out and replaced by "blue", the colour that forms — together with white and red — the French flag. The war flag of the Lombard Legion Despite the various hypotheses on the origin of the Italian tricolour and the meaning of its colours, there is no certain and unequivocal evidence of its existence before the entry of the French into Milan, which took place on 14 May 1796. In France, due to the Revolution, the flag had passed from having a "dynastic" and "military" meaning, to having a "national" one, and this concept, still unknown in Italy, was transmitted by the French to the Italians. This explains both the initial indifference to the adoption of the new flag, which left few certain traces of its origin, and the fact that initially, instead of adopting their own flag, many cities had raised the French tricolour. The new conquest was not, as in ancient times, "jealous" of its colours but proud that they were put on display, these being the symbols of a conquering army and a victorious people. It is to the French flag that the documents, at least until October 1796, refer when they use the term "tricolour". On 11 October 1796, Napoleon communicated to the Directory the birth of the Lombard Legion, a military unit constituted by the General Administration of Lombardy, a government headed by the Transpadane Republic. On this document, in reference to its war flag, which traced the French tricolor and which was proposed to Napoleon by the Milanese patriots, it is reported that: In this regard, one of the pro-Napoleonic Milanese patriots, the lawyer Giovanni Battista Sacco, declared: The Lombard Legion was therefore the first Italian military unit to have a tricolour war flag as a banner. According to the most authoritative sources, the choice made by the members of the Lombard Legion to replace the blue of the French flag with green is also linked to the colour of the uniforms of the Milanese city militia, whose members, since