Vanda Wilcox’s edited volume Italy in the Era of the Great War analyses the political, military, social, economic and cultural history of war in Italy between 1911 and 1922.

This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

The Italian Empire and the Great War brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911–12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915–18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically. In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though with limited results. Italy's newest colony, Libya, was also a theatre of the war effort, as the anti-colonial resistance there linked up with the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria to undermine Italian rule. Italian race theories underpinned this expansionism: the book examines how Italian constructions of whiteness and racial superiority informed a colonial approach to military occupation in Europe as well as the conduct of its campaigns in Africa. After the war, Italy's failures at the Peace Conference meant that the 'mutilated victory' was an imperial as well as a national sentiment. Events in Paris are analysed alongside the military occupations in the Balkans and Asia Minor as well as efforts to resolve the conflicts in Libya, to assess the rhetoric and reality of Italian imperialism.

In 1934, the Italians who shouted "Duce! Duce!" did not know their leader would take them into world war and national ruin.

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire. Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites. To maintain discipline, General Luigi Cadorna restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

The Great War in Italy. Representation and Interpretation collects interdisciplinary papers from international scholars who investigate the representation and interpretation of the First World War in Italy from the multi-faceted standpoints of literary criticism, history, cinema and cultural studies. The collected texts investigate a broad range of aspects of the Great War in the Italian context, from the ethical implications of testimony and literary rhetoric to the relationship between personal and public writing; from the role of intellectuals in the face of war to the political implications of identity, nationalism and irredentismo; from the function of propaganda and literacy among soldiers to the invention of a “spectacular” war through footage and movies.The introduction presents key-concepts such as conflict, individualism, brotherhood, responsibility, and propaganda within a framework of philosophical speculation on the idea of war as a constructive, and indeed necessary element of the relationship between individuals and of the process of identity-building, of which war represents an irrational degeneration.The volume is divided into four sections. The first focuses on language and propaganda, on the influence of the latter on the writings of soldiers, and on the role that some intellectuals such as D'Annunzio, De Roberto, Alvaro and Gadda played in representing the war and in elaborating its meaning. The second section focuses on the issue of literary representation of the war in poetry and narratives, with particular attention to the question of the “self” and to the relationship between dialect, war and poetry. Some articles also compare the British “war poets” to Italian contemporary poets, as well as to the poetics of Gadda and Ungaretti. The third section focuses on identity-related issues such as cosmopolitanism, the ideological value of irredentismo, brotherhood and the process of construction of the national identity through the experience of war. The fourth and last section concerns the legacy of the First World War in the work and function of the archival collections of letters, images and film-footage.This book offers a multidisciplinary insight into an event which was fundamental in shaping contemporary Italy and in determining the meaning of the legacy of the Italian experience in the First World War . This collection of scholarly contributions is accessible to non-specialist readers, and also represents a link between the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy and the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.