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This article studies the representation of the military in Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere with a focus on the askari Johannes, a veteran of the Italian colonial army. It will be demonstrated tha...

This article examines the theme of the military in the writings of Giovanni Verga in order to show its continued importance, and to shed new light on the cultural dimension of conscription ...

This chapter explores the cinematic representations of black American soldiers in Italian postwar cinema. Through an examination of films and broader contemporary visual culture, the chapter analyzes the portrayal of American soldiers and officers of Italian and African heritage in the Italian cultural imaginary. They point out that as difficult and heated conversations around racial politics are taking place in the United States and despite the image of Italy as offering a respite from those prejudices experienced in America, the representations of Italian and African American military personnel, nevertheless, stage oppositional masculinities, which are in the service of constructing Italian national identity (in terms of race, language, ethnicity).

The first chapter by Mattia Roveri, the editor of the volume, provides an overview of the project that also aims to set the following contributions in a broader context. With the aim to launch a much-needed conversation on the role and reflections of the military in Italian culture, this chapter offers a thematically structured discussion, first, on the historical development of the institution, and secondly, on different approaches to the military. All these are used to prepare the stage for the particular insights and approach that set this volume apart from many other works on the military, in Italy and elsewhere. In particular, this chapter explores the ways in which paying closer attention to the role of the military in civilian artworks (literature, music, fine arts, fashion, etc.) may offer us better insights not only of the military structures and experiences but also of the meaning of the military institution for our lives, in war and peacetime.

Francesca Gatta’s chapter examines the proximity between sports and the military experience in Italy during the First World War through newspaper articles. The war as portrayed in the newspapers differed gravely from the anonymous experience of mass war that is described in diaries and history handbooks. This can be explained by two factors: on the one hand, wartime censorship did not allow journalists to truly portray the war with facts (as Isnenghi says, without facts, reporters are left with nothing but the rhetoric of heroism): on the other hand, a newly arisen sports journalism considered sports a preparation for war. This conviction is well represented in the magazine Lo sport illustrato, originally a weekly illustrated supplement of La Gazzetta dello Sport, which expressed its attitude toward the Italian intervention by changing its name to Lo sport illustrato e la guerra at the beginning of the war (and again in 1917 to Il secolo illustrato). As Gatta notices, the magazine made ample room for events from the front but interpreted them like sports events with a singular commixture of the languages of sport and the military, which was facilitated by the proximity of sports fields and battlefields.