ITALY IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Saturday 10 October 2015
Taylor Institution, room 2
University of Oxford
St Giles’ Oxford OX1 3NA
ABSTRACTS
THE FAILURE OF FUTURIST INTERVENTIONISM, Dr Selena Daly
At first glance, it appears entirely logical that the Futurists, led by F.T. Marinetti, were at the forefront of Italy’s
interventionist campaign between August 1914 and May 1915, as generations of Futurist scholars have claimed.
After all, the movement was built on a rhetoric of violence and had been glorifying war since 1909. In reality,
however, as this paper will argue, the Futurists failed to mould themselves as a decisive force during this period,
and were much less influential and effective than both the Futurists themselves, and previous Futurist
scholarship, has acknowledged. Far from being a decisive force in the campaign waged against Italian neutrality,
Futurism began to collapse during this period because it was insufficiently political and belligerent. Its members
increasingly retreated into artistic activity and primarily engaged in the promotion of Futurism as a cultural,
rather than as a political, phenomenon. Through an examination of press reports and unpublished
correspondence, this paper will reconstruct the Futurists’ activities during Italian neutrality and how the Italian
public received them. Marinetti’s paralysis in the face of war in August 1914, the general indifference and derision
that greeted their participation in pro-war demonstrations, and the interventionist context of the famous split
with Lacerba will all examined as key moments in this nine-month period.
WORKING WITH ALLIES: THE BRITISH ARMY IN ITALY IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR , Dr John Dillon
On the outbreak of war, Italy declared neutrality rather than take up arms with her Triple Alliance partners.
Following this declaration, the British Foreign Secretary worked hard to persuade Italy to join the Entente as a
belligerent. However, by failing to include Germany in its declaration Italy was perceived as pursuing a separate
war. British military commanders, especially Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson, resented all
representations to them that they should divert troops from the Western front, where they believed Germany
would be defeated, to a ‘side-show’ like Italy. Following events at Caporetto, five divisions (later reduced to three)
were deployed to the Italian front to fight alongside French and Italian troops. The need to cooperate closely with
their southern ally caused increasing frustration among senior British commanders, which in turn influenced
decisions on the force structure of the Italian Expeditionary Force (IEF). By the time that the conflict ended, and
especially when the histories came to be written, the perception of Italy’s contribution was influenced by the
belief that the country had not been ‘up’ for it, as well as the tendency of the British military to see Italians as less
than equal partners.
AN ITALIAN-JEWISH PERSPECTIVE ON THE FIRST WORLD WAR, Dr Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti
This paper focuses on Italian Jewish reactions to the war and the war propaganda. Drawing on an analysis of
sermons, journal articles, pamphlets and on the existing Italian and international scholarship, it tackles the
problem of the new challenges faced by the minority during the war years. It especially focuses on what rabbis,
leaders of Jewish communities and contributors to Jewish journals said about the war, the meaning of Jewish
soldiers’ sacrifice on an international scale, and the specificities of the Italian case. Patriotism and loyalty to the
country were never questioned, but they were re-defined to fit the peculiar Italian Jewish patriotic narrative that
had taken shape during the Risorgimento.
MAKING WAR: D'ANNUNZIO’S WARTIME PROPAGANDA, Lucy Hughes-Hallett
In his first novel, Gabriele d’Annunzio has a wise mentor tell his hero: ‘You must make your life, as you would
make a work of art.’ As a young author in the 1880s and ‘90s, d’Annunzio proved himself a resourceful selfpublicist. When Italy entered the Great War, as he had stridently urged it to do, he set about making the war, as
he had made his own public persona. He saw action, on the ground, in the air (a courageous aviator, he was given
command of a bomber squadron) and from on board ship. Repeatedly he addressed the troops. His notebooks
show that he was fully aware of the ghastly nature of the conflict, but in his published writings, and his war-time
oratory, he ignores the pain and the squalor to create a vision of the war as a titanic foundry in which the Italian
nation was being forged. At the same time he was re-inventing himself again, as a hero worthy of the ‘Greater
Italy’ he was calling into being. This paper will examine d’Annunzio’s propagandist use of historical, cultural and
religious allusions to create a national mythology, one which would be further developed and exploited under
Fascism.
ITALY’S GREAT WAR: HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY , Prof Nicola Labanca
Italian historiography has reached the centenary of the country’s entry into the Great War without having
produced any major new works. But behind a façade of apparent consensus lies a background of historiographical
divisions. This is hardly surprising given that studies of Italy’s participation in the First World War have always
been strongly influenced by changing national political contexts. The inter-war celebrations were conditioned by
what Mussolini called the ‘time of myths’ and the inescapable influences exerted by fascist totalitarianism. After
1945 a somewhat embarrassed new anti-fascist democratic ruling class found a fragile compromise around
interpretations of the Great War as the last national war of independence. In the era of the ‘economic miracle’ in
the 1960s came the first more critical examinations, followed in the 1970s by the first real assaults on the older
myths in the ‘stagione dei movimenti’. The subsequent period of the so-called ‘retreat into the private’ led to a
fascination with the personal experience of war. With the end of the Cold War, the decline of social history and
the rise of sometimes shallow cultural history have come new emphases. This paper will survey these shifting
interpretations, looking at general histories and major research monographs in the context of the relationship
between historiography and politics.
THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT WAR AND ITALY’S FASCIST MONUMENTS TO THE FALLEN , Dr Hannah Malone
In the 1920s and ‘30s, the fascist state exhumed thousands of fallen soldiers of the Great War and re-buried them
in new ossuaries, which were built along the former frontlines in north eastern Italy and what is now Slovenia.
The ossuaries were part of the fascist regime’s efforts to control the memory of the war and to impose its own
version of the past. The nation was divided between some who remembered the war as a triumphant victory and
others as a pointless slaughter. In a fractured society, the ossuaries exploited death to foster a sense of unity and
to silence discordant voices, particularly among pacifists and neutralists. They used a rhetoric of victory to
promote nationalism, imperialism, and militarism. Drawing on ideals of heroism and martyrdom, they also
encouraged a cult of the fallen and appropriated their deaths as sacrifices for the fascist cause. As the war had
exposed Italy’s weaknesses in terms of its military skills, its foreign relations, and its international standing, the
ossuaries were integral to a strategy to restore the nation’s honour and dignity. Ultimately, they were intended to
re-write the memory of the Great War and to prepare the Italians for future military engagements.
HUMANITIES ACTIVISTS AND HUMANITARIAN AID IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: AN ANGLO-ITALIAN EXPERIMENT,
Dr Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe
The aim of this paper is to show how the First World War constituted an opportunity for ‘humanities activists’ to
engage in the war effort at transnational level. Following Italy’s decision to enter the war, in 1915, G.M. Trevelyan,
Cambridge historian, author of the famous Garibaldi trilogy, teacher at the Working Men’s College in London
and member of the British School at Rome, organised the British Committee in Aid of the Italian Wounded. A
convoy of British Red Cross vehicles crossed Europe to reach the theatre of war in the North-Eastern Italian Alps.
Here the British volunteers were joined by other scholars, including Thomas Ashby, archaeologist and Director
of the British School at Rome. As fluent Italian-speakers, Trevelyan, Ashby and other BSR men were an important
link between the British nurses and the Italian wounded. The operation which these Italophile scholars ran was
unusual in Italy. They were based on the Isonzo front, at Villa Trento, a place which became known behind the
war zone for its ‘home comforts’. The production of theatre performances, a humorous magazine and poetry
competitions amongst the Villa Trento volunteers suggest that ‘humanities activists’ challenged linguistic and
cultural barriers not only to attend to the wounded, but also to boost morale and provide ‘spiritual ammunition’
for allied soldiers.
REMEMBERING ITALY’S GREAT WAR: DIVIDED LEGACIES, Mark Thompson
This paper will consider how the Great War has been evoked and commemorated in Italy over the past halfcentury. The broadcasts produced by RAI; the attitudes of provincial and municipal authorities in the Veneto and
Friuli-Venezia Giulia; the status of certain cherished myths (e.g. about Habsburg Italians); the language of
government on 4 November; the stirrings of a movement for pardons or exonerations of Italian soldiers executed
summarily or after courts martial; trends and omissions in historical writing - these all have much to tell us about
the significance of the First World War in Italian life, and they confirm that attitudes to the war continue to reflect
anxieties about nationality and statehood.
………….
Selena Daly is a Fulbright Scholar at the Dept. of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her
research is also supported by an Irish Research Council Marie Curie Actions award. She has just completed a
monograph on Italian Futurism during the First World War, under contract with University of Toronto Press,
and is working on an edition of Marinetti’s wartime letters. She has received research funding from the Royal
Irish Academy and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and her work has been published in various
journals including Modern Italy and Annali d'Italianistica. In September 2015, she was part of the organizing team
of the biannual conference of the International Society for First World War Studies, held in Trento and Padua.
John Dillon trained for three years at the RAF College Cranwell, and went on to be a navigator on Vulcan
bombers. In 1976, after thirteen years of service, he left the air force to work in the mainframe computing industry.
For ten of those years he lived and worked in Denmark. In 2005 he took early retirement and became a mature
student at Reading University, taking a BA and MA in History, before proceeding to a PhD. His first book - on the
British forces in Italy in the First World War - is planned for publication in the autumn.
Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti (UCL, Department of Italian, SELCS) took her PhD in Contemporary History at
the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy) in 2006. Afterwards she worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at
the Scuola Normale, at the Foundation Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Milan), the Institut
d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (Paris), and Brandeis University. She has done extensive research on the
history of Italian Jews from the end of the XVIII century to WWI from an institutional and cultural perspective.
Amongst her other research interests: XIX century’s Italian racism and anti-Semitism; nationalization and
nationalism in XIX century Europe; the history of marriage and divorce in XIX and XX century Europe. Among
her publications: La «Nazione ebrea» di Livorno dai privilegi all’emancipazione (1815-1860), Le Monnier 2007 and Fare
gli ebrei italiani. Autorappresentazioni di una minoranza (1861-1914), Il Mulino 2011. An English translation of Fare gli
ebrei italiani is to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book on Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Pike (2013) won the Samuel Johnson Award for NonFiction, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her previous books are Cleopatra: Histories,
Dreams and Distortions (Fawcett Prize) and Heroes, which included a section on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s role as the
figurehead of the Risorgimento. She was the Evening Standard’s television reviewer for five years, she has
reviewed books for all the major British newspapers, and she has judged of a number of literary awards. She is
an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Oliver Janz is Professor of Contemporary History at Freie Universität Berlin and has been Visiting Professor in
Berne, Trento and Rome. He is co-editor of ‘Mondo Contemporaneo, of ‘Italien in der Moderne’ and editor-in-chief of
‘1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War’. His publications include Bürger besonderer Art.
Evangelische Pfarrer in Preußen 1850-1914 (1994); Centralismo e federalismo tra otto e novecento (1997); La morte per la
patria (2008); Das symbolische Kapital der Trauer (2009); Dolce Vita? Das Bild der italienischen Migranten in Deutschland
(2011); 14. Der Große Krieg (2013; Italian ed. 2014); Gender History in a transnational perspective (2014).
Hannah Malone, Magdalene College, Cambridge, is primarily interested in how architecture operates as a
medium for political exchange. As a junior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, she is currently
working on Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960), the most prominent architect of Mussolini’s fascist regime.
Previously, as a fellow (2013-14) at the British School at Rome, she undertook a project on Italy’s fascist ossuaries
of the Great War. Her doctoral research on Italy’s cemeteries of the nineteenth century as arenas for the politics
of the Risorgimento forms the basis for a book, which will be published shortly by Ashgate.
Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, is currently working on a project
entitled Books and Bullets: the Value of the Humanities during the First World War. Marcella has published various
articles in peer-reviewed journals, including most recently, ‘Reading at the front: Books and Soldiers in the First
World War’ (Paedagogica Historica due Jan. 2016). Marcella’s previous work has concentrated on the transnational
connections between Britain and Italy in the long nineteenth century. Her monograph, Victorian Radicals and
Italian Democrats, published by the Royal Historical Society in 2014, won the Scouloudi Award (IHR). In 2013-14
Marcella was an award holder at the British School at Rome. She is an Executive Member of the Association for
the Study of Modern Italy.
Hew Strachan has been Professor of International Relations at St Andrews University since April 2015. He was
Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford from 2002 to 2015, and Director of the Oxford
Changing Character of War Programme between 2003 and 2012. He also serves on the Strategic Advisory Panel
of the Chief of the Defence Staff and on the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board, as well as being a Trustee of
the Imperial War Museum, a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, and member of the UK, French and
Scottish advisory committees for the centenary of the First World War.
Mark Thompson (University of East Anglia) is the author of two works on the dissolution of the federal republic
of Yugoslavia, A Paper House. The ending of Yugoslavia (1992) and Forging War. The media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia
and Hercegovina (1999). His account of Italy’s experience in the First World War, The White War: Life and Death on
the Italian Front (2008), won the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize in 2009. He has translated fiction by Umberto Saba
and Claudio Magris. After seven years at the Open Society Foundations, supporting independent media, he has
taken up an appointment as Reader in Modern History at the University of East Anglia.