Italian Memory and Historiography and the First World War

The Great War played a central role in the construction of Italian public memory, for two main reasons. On the one hand, it was considered from the outset as the final act of the Risorgimento, since the war had finally succeeded in making the natural boundaries of the peninsula coincide with its political borders. On the other hand, the war also marked the start of a new phase of history, thanks to the prestige and new international standing that victory had brought to Italy. Even after interest in the political and diplomatic events that had made it possible to achieve these two fundamental results had dissipated between the 1950s and 1960s, attention to this period never disappeared. Rather, following the realization that the unique feature of the Great War was its total mobilization of the available human and material resources — and that for precisely this reason it was a true “test-bed of humanity” from a social, cultural, political, and institutional point of view — the years between 1915 and 1918 inevitably also became a fundamental “historiographical laboratory.”