Italy: Episode 3

Misha Glenny concludes the Invention of Italy in the Alps and Trieste, ambitious targets of Italian warmongers in the First World War."You need to think of the fighting taking place in Flanders applied in the rocky limestone of the Alps .... the Italians at the bottom, the Austrians at the top." Mark Thompson, The White WarIn 1915 Italy entered the Great War on the side of France, Britain and Russia. The aim ? To gain new territory up north to the watershed of the Alps; and also east over the Adriatic into parts of what later became Yugoslavia. The price of these ambitions - nearly three quarters of a million Italians dead in the snow and rock. They died upholding the nationalist belief this new Italian nation - barely fifty years old - needed to spill blood to prove itself, to demonstrate they were not just waiters and ice cream salesmen. Chief among the characters who dragged Italy into war was a poet, Gabrielle d'Annunzio, bald as a coot and a great seducer of Italian women, and Italian minds. In the third and final Invention of Italy, Misha Glenny travels along the frontline, from Trieste via alpine trenches to Lake Garda, where d'Annunzio's Vittoriale degli Italiani attempted to create an Italian fighting tradition by dragging a battleship up the hill and setting it among ornamental gardens. With expert contributions from Joze Serbec of the Kobarid museum in Slovenia; Lucy Hughes-Hallet, author of The Pike, the autobiography of d'Annunzio shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; plus Simon Winder, David Gilmour, David Laven, and Mark Thompson, author The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front.