Irredentist Propaganda “Baedeker Style:” Anna Franchi’s and Willy Dias’ Nationalist Geographical Fantasy

Abstract

This article analyzes how Anna Franchi and Willy Dias (Fortuna Morpurgo) utilized the language of tourism in their irredentist writings during the first two years of World War I. I look at how they adopted specific features of travel guidebooks to create a nationalistic geographical fantasy. I argue that the two authors’ similar approaches have the same two-fold goal: to teach about the geography, history, and even the existence of the contended areas; to induce their readers to “imagine” the nation (in Benedict Anderson’s terms) as a community ideally united, within and beyond the state’s borders, by a common cultural, linguistic, geographical and ethnic heritage. Inspired by Risorgimento ideology and by irredentist historians, Dias and Franchi rooted such heritage in Greek and Roman history and myth and in the Venetian identity of the contended lands. I show how, through discursive strategies of inclusion/exclusion, Dias and Franchi represented the Mediterranean civilization as antithetic to German and Slavic “barbarism.” Drawing upon the work of historians of the Adriatic Littoral, I place Dias’ and Franchi’s works in the broader context of the history of the representation of the contended provinces in irredentist discourse. Through the lens of the Sociology of Tourism, and the Semiotics of Tourism I look at how the two authors produced an ideologized vision of landscape.