Italy and the Great War

The Italian theater in the Great War.  Trieste is at far right, the Carso
just above it.  The black lines at right depict the Austrian offensive
known by the name of the town, Caporetto.  The offensive ended
with the Italian army pushed back to the River Piave, the red line
at center, just northeast of Venice. 

Rome the Second Time is the first guidebook to take up seriously the historic events leading to and including World War II: the 1922 March on Rome, which installed Mussolini and the Fascists; Hitler’s 1938 visit, which produced the fateful alliance of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; the fighting in the city following the Italian withdrawal from the war and the German occupation in 1943; the deportation of Rome’s Jews to concentration camps; and the bombing in via Rasella and the vicious Nazi retaliation for it at the Fosse Ardeatine in 1944. We included these events—and existing sites that reveal them--because they continue to shape perceptions of what it means to be Italian.

The poet and warmonger Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1918

When we wrote the book we knew much less about Italy’s role in the Great War, now known as World War I, partly because that war took place nearly a century ago, but also because the war didn’t pass through Rome; fighting was restricted to northern and northeastern Italy, to the Trentino, Veneto, Friuli, and a section of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire that included the Carso Plateau (close to Trieste), the Bainsizza Plateau, and the hills and mountains on both sides the River Isonzo. Italy was fighting with the Allies (France, Great Britain, Russia, and later the US) and against Austria-Hungary and Germany, but it was in the war only because it hoped to acquire territory, especially the coastal city of Trieste (where there were many Italians) but also the seaboard of the Eastern Adriatic (where the people were mostly Slavic). Italy was the aggressor, led to war by patriotic demagogues—the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and Mussolini among them—who called it “the fourth war for independence.” It was nothing of the sort.

We know something about this conflict now because we’ve just finished Mark Thompson’s remarkable book, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 (New York: Basic Books, 2008); the title best reflects the fighting that took place to the north and east of Lake Garda in the Dolomite Mountains, actually a minor theater.

Oddly, Italy got just about everything it wanted, territorially, from the war. But the methods by which it was fought, the rhythm of the conflict, and Italian demands at the end of the war, made it seem to many like a humiliating defeat, and that perception fueled the rise of Fascism.

The methods? Under its arrogant, thoughtless and stubborn commander, General Luigi Cadorna, the hardly-trained, badly-equipped Italian infantrymen were sent up one steep mountainside after another, into the machine guns of the Austrian army, waiting in trenches behind barbed wire that the Italians had great difficulty cutting or blowing up. The result, concludes Thompson, was a bloodbath even worse than that on the storied Western Front. In the Italian theater—and nowhere else in the entire war—the carnage was so extreme that more than once Austrian defenders, horrified at the slaughter, implored the oncoming Italians to stop and save themselves: “Italians! Go back! We don’t want to massacre you!” By war’s end, some 900,000 Italians had been killed or wounded.

An Italian trench on the Carso plateau, 1917

When soldiers questioned their orders, Cadorna met threats to military discipline, even minor ones, with his own version of military justice, urging his officers to employ the Roman practice of decimation, in which 1 in 10 members of a unit were killed at random, by names drawn out of a hat. No other army did this.



The remains of an Austrian trench on
Monte Sei Busi



 The war went badly for Italy, horrific assault after horrific assault along the Isonzo—eleven by October 1917—but minimal gains in territory. A deadly stalemate. Then things changed. Exploiting a weakness in the Italian defenses and a distracted and inept Cadorna, an Austro-German force poured through a gap in the mountains at the small town of Caporetto (the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda was serving nearby) and from there out onto the plains of Friuli, the Italian army in a nightmarish retreat—many soldiers throwing away their guns and heading home--that would not end until the River Piave, 70 kilometers to the west and only 25 kilometers from Venice (see map at the top of this post). “No single defeat in battle,” writes Thompson, “had placed Italy in such peril since Hannibal destroyed the Roman legions at Cannae, more than two thousand years before.” The Fascists would spin this defeat their own way, insisting on the integrity and honor of the army while indicting the liberal government in Rome for tolerating defeatists (not unlike the approach the right would take in the 1970s to the Vietnam war). Nonetheless, to this day the word “Caporetto” is a metaphor for scandal, corruption, and defeat; Italian red tape, notes Thompson, might be referred to as an “administrative Caporetto.”  Similarly, the phrase "another Vietnam" means another humiliating defeat, or another quagmire. 

Italian soldier taken prisoner after
the battle of Caporetto

The rest of the story, briefly told: The Austro-German force failed to exploit its advantage, and the Italian line at the Piave held. French and British troops moved in to assist the hapless Italians and the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary. A new Italian commander, General Armando Diaz, restored order, discipline and morale to the Italian ranks. On the other side, the Germans removed their divisions to the Western Front and the remaining Austrian armies began to suffer shortages of food and military supplies.

Because Italy was keeping a lot of Austrian troops away from the all-important Western Front, the Allies were willing to support most of Italy’s war aims. In June 1918, a desperate, failed Austrian army attack at the Piave ended in disaster and retreat, and the Italian army, now bolstered by French and British forces, went on the offensive. By November 4, when the Armistice went into effect, the Austrians were again at the Isonzo, this time in full flight—a “Caporetto in reverse,” as Diaz wrote to his wife. An Italian destroyer had staked the Italian claim to Trieste. “Just when we learned to fight,” went a joke going around the infantry, “the war is over!”

In the negotiations over territory that followed, the Italians overreached, demanding territory to the east, lands occupied by 750,000 Slovenes and Croats; the Dalmatian Islands; and Fiume on the Adriatic, the only port that would have provided the new state of Yugoslavia essential access to the sea and merchant shipping. When Italy did not get all that it wanted—Fiume became a free state, and most of the Dalmatians went to Yugoslavia—right-wing zealots cast the result as a great humiliation and defeat, perpetrated by a soft liberal state. D’Annunzio’s spoke of a “mutilated victory,” and Mussolini’s followers promised revenge for the Great Betrayal. The stage was set for the March on Rome. 

Bill

The Fascists made myth of Italy's role in the Great War, constructing more than 40 major monuments
to the dead.  One of the them, the cemetery at Redipuglia, holds the bodies of more than 100,000 Italian
soldiers.  It is constructed as a set of terraces, replicating the army's efforts to scale Friuli's mountains.
Thompson writes that the Redipuglia cemetery and smaller, regimental ones, "became the showpiece of Fascist commemorative architectonics." 





RST Top 40. #20: The Strange World of Coppede'

It was not long after we met in the winter of 1993--he was a graduate student in my class in the American Studies Department at the University of Rome, La Sapienza--that Massimo realized that Dianne and I had rather odd touristic tastes; while we enjoyed the standard fare, we savored the funky and unusual. And so began a series of journeys, with Massimo presenting some of his native Rome's more curious sites. On one occasion, we motored around the city in the morning darkness in pursuit of all-night bakeries, where we ordered our pastries directly from the baker, through a back door. On another--a dreary, rainy day--Massimo drove me to an early modernist shopping center somewhere on the fringe of the city, a place so little known he's forgotten he took me there and that I've been unable to locate.

And then there was Coppedé. It was nearing midnight when Massimo stopped the car in a piazza somewhere in the the north of Rome, and we got out. My first impression--and hardly an original one--was of an architecture both playful and, at that hour, menacing (the piazza appears in Dario Argento's 1980 horror film, Inferno)--and, above all, original. I had never seen anything like it anywhere--echoes of Spain's Gaudi, perhaps, but much more, too--and certainly not in Rome. And that's why it's #20 on Rome the Second Time's Top 40. The piazza's Palazzina del Ragno (spider) is at upper left. Below right, that's Dianne in her Fidel cap, demonstrating the playful side of Coppedé.

There is much more to it than I saw that night: 15 buildings by the architect Gino Coppedé, for whom the Quartiere Coppedé is named, and some 40 buildings in all, amounting to what one critic has described as an "urban hallucination." Despite the name, Coppedé is not an official "quarter." It's actually at the southwest end of Quartiere Trieste, 2 blocks northeast of Piazza Buenos Aires, which is on viale Regina Margherita, and about 4 blocks west of via Salaria.

It would be delightful to come across Coppedé by chance, as writer Martha Pichey did in 1987, compelled to make sense of the lions' heads, Latin inscriptions, giant bees, and other decorations that, well, don't make much sense. For the majority who prefer to plan, perhaps the best entrance to the area is through the massive arch on via Dora,
not far from Piazza Buenos Aires. Start there, move on to Piazza Mincio (where Massimo took us), then amble. There are other Coppedé works on via Brenta (#s7, 9, 14 and 16), via Ombrone (#8-10, 11), via Serchio (#2) and via Olana (#7). The forest is lovely, but don't miss the trees: the gates, fences, ceramic urns, winged serpents, hanging lanterns, a sundial, and other ornamentations that lend Coppedé that air of weird excess. One way to enjoy the area is to try to pick out elements of the great variety of styles Coppedé employed, including baroque, Moorish, gothic, Renaissance, and--yes--Babylonian. The photos below are of Piazza Mincio's Villino delle Fate (fairies), so named because of its extravagant decoration.

There is no easy accounting for what Gino Coppedé accomplished here, but it won't hurt to know something about the architect. He was born in Florence in 1866, where his father had a workshop, Casa Artistica, where Gino and his brother learned to carve the decorative flourishes that Firenze's upper class favored for their fireplaces and armoires. By age 24 he had combined that practical training with two advanced degrees: one from the Professional School of Industrial and Decorative Arts, another from the city's Academy of Fine Arts. Coppedé's first home project was outside Genoa, where a Scot, Evan McKenzie, hired him to "reconstruct" his substantial villa.
Completed in 1904, the conversion brought him instant recognition and s spate of other home projects for ambitious and intrepid Genoese elites. The Rome adventure began in 1919, when Genoese financiers, familiar with his work, hired him to design 18 palaces and 27 smaller villas--early condominiums, essentially, designed to be sold to civil servants and professionals. By 1926, less than half had been built. Aside from the Quartiere, Coppedé had only one other Rome commission--a simpler building at 7 via Veneto, completed in 1927, the year he died.

Most scholars would describe Coppedé's work as an example of art nouveau (called liberty in Italy), while noting that that the Quartiere's bold and extravagant use of the style is in a certain way perverse, given that construction took place long after art nouveau had reached its peak and while modernists forms and expressions were in ascendancy in architecture and design.

One authority notes that Coppedé's version of nouveau rejected the sexualized motifs common in France and Germany for playful but more stolid and moral expressions having appeal to Italy's middle class.

At the risk of scandalizing our architectural-critic readers, it seems not unreasonable to use the word "postmodern" to describe the quartiere. Although "postmodern" is usually employed to mark the decline of pure modernism and the rise of a more eclectic style of pastiche in the 1970s, it could be argued that Gino Coppedé was there first, toying with an emergent modernism, holding the nascent rationalism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus at arm's length while insisting on the vibrant variety of architecture's history.


Bill

RST Top 40. #21: Sant'Agnese fuori le mura: a haven in a heartless world

Churches - they're everywhere in Rome; are there 300 of them? 500? 900 say some. Should one even be in the Top 40 of RST? With some coaxing from me (Bill never saw a church he willingly would go into - unless it was brutalist architecture - see his post of 8/30/09), Sant'Agnese fuori le mura ("outside the walls") comes in at #21.

One of the divine qualities of this church is where it is - amid the busy traffic of multi-laned via Nomentana, pushed up against the now dense high-rise residential area of Trieste, decidedly outside the walls of ancient, even Renaissance Rome. But there it is, placed in "a courtyard bathed in peace, greenery, and light" (to quote ourselves from Chapter 3 - "Beyond the Wall" - of Rome the Second Time).

Sant'Agnese fuori le mura is also one of those fabulous lessons in the layers of Rome: pagan, Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, contemporary. There are ruins from a 4th century AD covered cemetery built by the Emperor Constantine (the first Emperor who converted to Christianity) or by (or for) his daughter or possibly granddaughter, both named Constantia. There is the mausoleum for Constantia, now called the mausoleum of "Santa Costanza" (a nun, not Constantia, and not officially a saint), reputedly built over the bones of Sant'Agnese - got all that?. And, there is the 7th century basilica of martyred Sant'Agnese - built (over the 4th century one) alongside the mausoleum and containing extensive catacombs (which one can visit). The catacomb level was then the first floor; now it is several floors below ground level. The portico is 16th century. Add a medieval tower. The soccer fields and snack bar (when we were last there) are contemporary.

Saint Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, because she refused to give herself to anyone except God. In various versions of her story (in one she is 13, in another an adult), the pagan Romans strip her of her clothes, and her hair grows to cover her nakedness. She's also the patron saint of the wonderful Borromini church in Piazza Navona, Sant'Agnese in Agonia (Saint Agnes in Agony).

That toughest of art critics, Georgina Masson, calls Sant'Agnese fuori le mura "one of the rare Roman churches which has best preserved the appearance--and the atmosphere--of a very ancient Christian place of worship."

Dianne - This one's for you, Bruce P!

Tooting the horn for Rome and...

Rome the Second Time is now on Facebook (thanks to a Rome fan, Michael Calleri). A group of Rome lovers are friends of RST on the newly created group.

Already some good comments there, including someone who likes the Corso Trieste ("Africa") area in northeast Rome, an interesting and little-visited area. Adjacent is the fascinating Coppede' neighborhood - worthy of a photo here (1920s Art Nouveau).

And you'll see editorial reviews of Rome the Second Time on the updated amazon.com page (along with a new reader review...you're all welcome to add reader reviews!).

RST also recently hit #1 in Kindle Family Travel, #2 in European Tourist Destinations and Museums and #2 in Italy - behind only Rick Steves. All this with a downturn in travel AND books (well, is Kindle a book?). Goes to show, I think, that people are looking for alternative and frugal travel.

End of commercial. Dianne