“Si va avanti, ma Trieste non si prende mai!”. The irredentism movement and its baptism of fire

Abstract

Italian irredentism surely represents an intriguing case of study in the consistent amount of ideas promoted as positive by the propaganda in the years before World War I and then, after the war experience, renounced. Irredentism, indeed, was deeply rooted both in literature’s and journalism’s rhetoric before 1915, but during the war it was rejected from the literary field: authors like Frescura, Lussu, Puccini and Soffici underline the decadence of Resurgence’s idealisms, and denounce a deep discrepancy between the mystified ideologies used by the newspapers and the High Command, and their destruction in the private war’s testimonies.