War Tourism in Italy (1919–1939)

Abstract

The excursions organized by Touring Club Italiano (TCI) and other institutions to battlefields and war cemeteries contributed to creating the construction of collective memory among Italian people based on materiality, symbolic meanings of space, civil rituals and touristic practices. Above all, the TCI, from 1919 until the 1939, organized excursions in war zones like Trentino-Alto Adige and Venezia Giulia, involving the relatives of fallen soldiers, war veterans and citizens who wanted to discover new territories obtained by Italy with the Treaties of Peace (1919–1920). Starting from the mid-1920s, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND) includes, among its touristic activities, excursions into war zones that celebrated the memory of the victorious war and the people who fought it. During the 1930s Fascism used war pilgrimages as a tool for political propaganda and a form of national memory to glorify the soldiers who died during the war with great memorial monuments such as the Redipuglia shrine launched by Mussolini.