"What an Aesthetic War": The Italian Media Strategy and the Military During the First World War

The chapter explores the various media strategies at the time during the First World War (WWI) when reporting news and war reports was particularly complicated and subject to severe censorship. Indeed, in May 1915, when the Kingdom of Italy entered the Great War, the nation’s cultural mobilization was part of this transnational process of forging an acceptable and comforting ‘War tale,’ where the constant manipulation of national information was essential to building a cohesive narration of the nation at war. Mondini points out, however, that the Italian case remains still marginal in scholarly discussions of the military history between 1914 and 1918, and the development of war culture in the Peninsula is an unknown and neglected subject. To fill this gap, his contribution aims to provide an overview of media strategies (newspapers and periodical press) in the process of forging Italy’s own narration of Total War.