Italy in the Era of the Great War

Italy in the Era of the Great War
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004363726

In Italy in the Era of the Great War, Vanda Wilcox brings together nineteen Italian and international scholars to analyse the political, military, social and cultural history of Italy in the country’s decade of conflict from 1911 to 1922. Starting with the invasion of Libya in 1911 and concluding with the rise of post-war social and political unrest, the volume traces domestic and foreign policy, the economics of the war effort, the history of military innovation, and social changes including the war’s impact on religion and women, along with major cultural and artistic developments of the period. Each chapter provides a concise and effective overview of the field as it currently stands as well as introducing readers to the latest research. Contributors are Giulia Albanese, Claudia Baldoli, Allison Scardino Belzer, Francesco Caccamo, Filippo Cappellano, Selena Daly, Fabio Degli Esposti, Spencer Di Scala, Douglas J. Forsyth, Irene Guerrini, Oliver Janz, Irene Lottini, Stefano Marcuzzi, Valerie McGuire, Marco Pluviano, Paul O’Brien, Carlo Stiaccini, Andrea Ungari, and Bruce Vandervort. See inside the book.

The White War

The White War
Author: Mark Thompson
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786744383

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire. Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites. To maintain discipline, General Luigi Cadorna restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War

Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War
Author: Vanda Wilcox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2016-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316692469

Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.

The Italian Empire and the Great War

The Italian Empire and the Great War
Author: Vanda Wilcox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198822944

The Italian Empire and the Great War brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911DS12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915DS18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically. In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though with limited results. Italy's newest colony, Libya, was also a theatre of the war effort, as the anti-colonial resistance there linked up with the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria to undermine Italian rule. Italian race theories underpinned this expansionism: the book examines how Italian constructions of whiteness and racial superiority informed a colonial approach to military occupation in Europe as well as the conduct of its campaigns in Africa. After the war, Italy's failures at the Peace Conference meant that the 'mutilated victory' was an imperial as well as a national sentiment. Events in Paris are analysed alongside the military occupations in the Balkans and Asia Minor as well as efforts to resolve the conflicts in Libya, to assess the rhetoric and reality of Italian imperialism.

A Soldier on the Southern Front

A Soldier on the Southern Front
Author: Emilio Lussu
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0847842797

A rediscovered World War I masterpiece—one of the few memoirs about the Italian front—for fans of military history and All Quiet on the Western Front An infantryman’s “harrowing, moving, [and] occasionally comic” account of trench warfare on the alpine front seen in A Farewell to Arms (Times Literary Supplement). Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir as an infantryman is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals in spare and detached prose the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy—the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.

Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War

Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War
Author: Stefano Marcuzzi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108924603

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.

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I
Author: Graziella Parati
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2016-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611479517

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

The Libyan War 1911-1912

The Libyan War 1911-1912
Author: Andrea Ungari
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2014-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443864927

The war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire for possession of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania was a crucial event both for Italian domestic and foreign policy and for the contemporary European balance of power. For Italian society the Libyan conflict was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the First World War. The propaganda campaign for the occupation of Libya, orchestrated around the myth of the “Grande Italia” and the “Grande proletaria” had an important impact on the Italian political system, even more than the military operations, testing its stability and leading to violent debate not only between the parties, but also inside the parties themselves. The essays brought together in this book illustrate the attitude of the political forces that were the main supporters of the Italian intervention in Libya, and the international context in which the war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire came about. Using new sources or re-reading the sources already known with the insight gained from the passage of a hundred years, the authors reflect on a conflict that had profound repercussions for Italian and European politics and contributed to ending the Belle Époque, raising in the minds of both the Italian and European public the specter of a new war in Europe.

The Italian Army and the First World War

The Italian Army and the First World War
Author: John Gooch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2014-06-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521193079

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.