The World Wars and The History of Italy: Shared and Disputed Memories, in Memories and Representations of War in Europe: the case of WW1 and WW2, V. Fortunati - E. Lamberti (eds.), New York-Amsterdam, Rodopy, 2009, pp. 79-93 (original) (raw)

Italy's Decade of War: 1935-45 in International Perspective Conference Programme

From the invasion of Abyssinia to the end of World War Two, Italy experienced a decade of war. This conference aims to re-evaluate the history of the Italian experience during this ten-year period with a unifying perspective that places the Italian Fascist regime and its foreign and military enterprises in an entirely internationalised framework of analysis. It will bring an international focus upon the Italian role in the break-down of the international system and appeasement, and will analyse the consequences of Italian militarism on a global scale. It will explore comparative and transnational histories of the Italian occupations of France, the Balkans, Greece, and Albania, as well as the Allied occupation of Italy following the defeat. The conference will seek to place particular emphasis upon the significance of the Mediterranean region in the wider history of the Second World War, exploring the broader implications of Italy’s actions in Africa and the Middle East. It will also look at Italian diplomatic, military and economic relations with Britain, the United States, and Nazi Germany, as well as those with other states such as Vichy France and Spain. This conference aims to bring together scholars working in the fields of military, political, diplomatic, international, colonial, transnational, and comparative history, and encourages inter-disciplinary contributions. The conference organisers aim to publish selected papers in an edited volume and a journal special issue.

Italy’s Intervention To WWI. The “Home Front” And The Psychological Heritage

Journal of history, 2020

This paper aims to share the most updated results of the Italian and foreign historiography about how and why the Italians split on the opportunity to go to war joining the Entente powers and on the Italian society in the war years. The better part of the supporters of the intervention argued that the war was the great opportunity for completing national unity. Aside or behind this rational aim purposes such as imposing to Italian people an ordeal so to bring it to maturity and self-confidence were present. The leftist supporters of the intervention looked beyond the immediate territorial interests and aimed at the destruction of the "prison of the peoples", to say the Habsburg Empire. One of them was Benito Mussolini, who used to be a prominent left-wing socialist and traumatically broke with his comrades joining the pro-war front. Catholics, socialists and many liberals, in sum the majority of the country, did not desire the intervention, but their opposition was dull and passive. Italian intervention was largely a coup d'état prompted by a violent minority. Nonetheless Italians accepted tamely the decision of the government and went to die in the trenches. Only in 1917, and especially in Turin, there were serious troubles, which started due to shortage of essential goods. Even the Russian revolutions and the great Caporetto defeat did not push the socialists to modify their loyal and passive attitude. The happiness for the final victory was from the very beginning poisoned by the sensation that France and Great Britain inclined to give scarce satisfaction to Italy, especially in the eastern Adriatic shore and in Turkey. So, Italy emerged from the war in a psychological state closer to the mood of a defeated country rather than to the mood of a victorious country.