On the Trail of Returns. For a Study of Veterans in the Long Post-War Period in Italy (1945–1960): Potentiality and Challenges
The paper aims to present a methodological reflection of prosopographic interest around a specific case study: Italian veterans of the Second World War in the post-war period. The most important source was a group of diaries and memoirs (differing in terms of writing style and timing), which reconstruct the biographies of around fifty Italian veterans who, following military defeats, experienced war imprisonment. These biographies were compared with other types of sources, from printed sources to documents from institutional and political party archives.
The group of veterans analyzed came from different prison camps, namely, those held by British or Russian forces. The following study intertwines the twenty-year Fascist period, the years of conflict and imprisonment, and above all the years following the end of the conflict, particularly the first decade of the Italian Republic.
The sources used were interrogated through the following questions: Who were these veterans? What was their geographical origin, social background and level of education? What was their relationship with Italian Fascism and the violence of war? These questions aim to reconstruct the first part of veterans’ biographies. At this point, the next questions were: what was the return like for these former prisoners? How did they adapt to their new life of peace and how did they respond to the birth of the Republic? To what extent did their geographical origin, social class, and level of education influence the different political orientations adopted during the post-Second World War reconstruction years? What “paths” did their memories follow over time? And what measures were adopted and what memory policies were developed by the Italian Republic in subsequent years around the veterans?
The study of Italian veterans brings with it both potentialities and challenges. The analysis of this collective biography highlights several long-period historiographical issues. Furthermore, the comparative study of different profiles allows to reconstruct a broad and complex picture of the group as well as to identify common characteristics, general lines and internal connection networks. The methodological potential is closely intertwined with the challenges, as the extreme variety of subjects makes immediate attempts at synthesis and universalization difficult. The use and cross-referencing of different types of sources – from the ”ego documents” to the classic administrative and statistical sources – appears to be the most fruitful way for a prosopographic investigation, combining essential quantitative analysis with thoughtful qualitative analysis.
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Francesca Luigia Massaro is a PhD student in Historical Studies at the University of Milan, Department of Historical Studies “Federico Chabod”. The title of her research project is: From captivity to return: Italian veterans between history, representations and memory (1945–1960), Supervisor: Prof. Claudia Baldoli, Co-Supervisor: Prof. Irene Piazzoni. Her research interests focus on the political, social and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the periods of the First World War, the twenty years of Fascism, the Second World War and the second Italian post-war period.
E-mail: francesca.massaro@unimi.it
