Italy And The Great War

Vanda Wilcox’s edited volume Italy in the Era of the Great War analyses the political, military, social, economic and cultural history of war in Italy between 1911 and 1922.

This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. Marcuzzi considers three main issues - war aims, war strategy and peace-making - and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

Drawing on both wartime discourse about women and the voices of individual women living at the Italian Front, Allison Belzer analyzes how women participated in the Great War and how it affected them. The Great War transformed women into purveyors and recipients of a new feminine ideal that emphasized their status as national citizens. Although Italian women did not gain the vote, they did encounter a less empowering form of female citizenship just after the war ended with Mussolini's Fascism. Because of the Great War, many women seized the opportunity to participate in a society that continued to recognize them as guardians of the nation.

A major new account of the role and performance of the Italian army in the First World War. Setting military events in a broad context, Gooch explores pre-war Italian military culture, and reveals how an army with a reputation for failure fought a challenging war in appalling conditions - and won.

The Legend of the Mutilated Victory is the first book in any language to analyze Italian diplomacy from the outbreak of World War I to the Paris Peace Conference.

The Great War in Italy. Representation and Interpretation collects interdisciplinary papers from international scholars who investigate the representation and interpretation of the First World War in Italy from the multi-faceted standpoints of literary criticism, history, cinema and cultural studies. The collected texts investigate a broad range of aspects of the Great War in the Italian context, from the ethical implications of testimony and literary rhetoric to the relationship between personal and public writing; from the role of intellectuals in the face of war to the political implications of identity, nationalism and irredentismo; from the function of propaganda and literacy among soldiers to the invention of a “spectacular” war through footage and movies.The introduction presents key-concepts such as conflict, individualism, brotherhood, responsibility, and propaganda within a framework of philosophical speculation on the idea of war as a constructive, and indeed necessary element of the relationship between individuals and of the process of identity-building, of which war represents an irrational degeneration.The volume is divided into four sections. The first focuses on language and propaganda, on the influence of the latter on the writings of soldiers, and on the role that some intellectuals such as D'Annunzio, De Roberto, Alvaro and Gadda played in representing the war and in elaborating its meaning. The second section focuses on the issue of literary representation of the war in poetry and narratives, with particular attention to the question of the “self” and to the relationship between dialect, war and poetry. Some articles also compare the British “war poets” to Italian contemporary poets, as well as to the poetics of Gadda and Ungaretti. The third section focuses on identity-related issues such as cosmopolitanism, the ideological value of irredentismo, brotherhood and the process of construction of the national identity through the experience of war. The fourth and last section concerns the legacy of the First World War in the work and function of the archival collections of letters, images and film-footage.This book offers a multidisciplinary insight into an event which was fundamental in shaping contemporary Italy and in determining the meaning of the legacy of the Italian experience in the First World War . This collection of scholarly contributions is accessible to non-specialist readers, and also represents a link between the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy and the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire, hoping to seize its 'lost' territories of Trieste and Tyrol. The result was one of the most hopeless and senseless modern wars - and one that inspired great cruelty and destruction. Nearly three-quarters of a million Italians - and half as many Austro-Hungarian troops - were killed. Most of the deaths occurred on the bare grey hills north of Trieste, and in the snows of the Dolomite Alps. Outsiders who witnessed these battles were awestruck by the difficulty of attacking on such terrain. General Luigi Cadorna, most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, restored the Roman practice of 'decimation', executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. Italy sank into chaos and, eventually, fascism. Its liberal traditions did not recover for a quarter of a century - some would say they have never recovered. Mark Thompson relates this nearly incredible saga with great skill and pathos. Much more than a history of terrible violence, the book tells the whole story of the war: the nationalist frenzy that led up to it, the decisions that shaped it, the poetry it inspired, its haunting landscapes and political intrigues; the personalities of its statesmen and generals; and also the experience of ordinary soldiers - among them some of modern Italy's greatest writers. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to one of the most remarkable untold stories of the First World War.