On the occasion of the centenary of the end of the First World War, the Italian Cultural Institute in London organises a lecture by Mario Isnenghi.
In this lecture, the First World War will be presented considering its Italian battlefront. Not because it was only “Our War” – an approach that would neglect its character of a world- and European conflict – but in order to try to focus on the specific aspects of it.
The First World War was a conflict of myths and anti-myths. At the beginning of the 20th century, the great social scientist Vilfredo Pareto explained that classes, class struggle and revolution might be not philologically “real”, but they were real because they appeared realistic, and therefore moved the expectations and emotions of millions of proletarians: if the bourgeoisie wanted to maintain its power, it needed to arm itself with myths equal to those of the counterpart. War will thus be also an existential and political medication, which conveyed mass and individual urge and behaviour, from Trento and Trieste to Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto.
In the last decades, historiography has very much focused on the interpretation of facts rather than facts themselves. It’s good to be fully aware that ideologies, feelings, the “not-true” perceived as “true” are facts – “second degree facts” – and therefore have to be analysed and understood. However, it’s also time to restore the value of objective facts, aka “first degree facts”; just to mention the three most important ones: how did Italy really enter the war, what happened in Caporetto, what was Vittorio Veneto.
Mario Isnenghi has been professor of History of journalism at the University of Padova. He then has been teaching at the Universities of Turin and Venice. In the latter, he was Head of the Department of History and Full Professor of contemporary history. His several publications are points of reference for contemporary historiography. He is currently president of Iveser, Institute for the history of Resistance and contemporary society of Venice.
