Born in Rome in 1886, Virginio Gayda was a correspondent for the Turin-based newspaper La Stampa in Habsburg Vienna from 1910 to 1914. Starting from that experience, Anthony Di Iorio’s volume focuses on Gayda’s trajectory as a journalist embedded within the nationalist and then Fascist networks. Alongside his work Crisi di un impero. Pagine dall’Austria contemporanea (1913), Gayda’s articles collected in L’Italia d’oltre confine: Le provincie italiane d’Austria (1914) helped to credit the looming prospect of a “Slavic invasion” in the northern Adriatic region and to feed the Italian irredentist and nationalist currents. The main thesis of the book is that Gayda “personified the continuity of these currents and gave expression to the imperialistic and racist excesses of the First and Second World Wars” (41).

Drawing on a close reading of Gayda’s articles and works, Di Iorio analyzes his contribution to the Italian nationalist discourse in the context of the “twentieth-century war of Austrian succession.” In fact, Gayda repeatedly spoke out against any prospect of a trialist reform of the Habsburg Empire, which would have ensured a prominent role for the “Yugoslav” component to the detriment of the “Italian” one, and he actively participated in the campaign for Italy’s entry into the war against Austria-Hungary. In this way, he became the bearer of representations and slogans that permeated the Italian-speaking irredentism of Trieste, which included Attilio Tamaro, Mario Alberti, and Ruggero Fauro (Timeus), and helped to circulate them in the Italian National Association, of which he was an active member from 1914. This radical nationalism became very popular during the postwar crisis by merging anti-Slavism with anti-Bolshevism and associating itself with the rising Fascism. Gayda thus contributed to the fascistization of the liberal-democratic newspaper Il Messaggero as director from 1921 to 1926, after which he became director of the Fascist newspaper Il Giornale d’Italia from 1926 to 1943, supporting the imperial and then racist campaign of Mussolini’s dictatorship.

This book attempts to bring together Gayda’s intellectual biography, the historical analysis of the “Italian-Austrian” and “Italian-Yugoslav” conflict, and the scholarly discussion of the Habsburg Empire and the Upper Adriatic. The research is based on Gayda’s personal archives and diplomatic sources. The bibliography is rich and multilingual, but it includes works of varying value (many of them tied to exclusively national research agendas). Di Iorio’s main argument emphasises that Gayda “was far from unique in viewing the Empire as a doomed, dysfunctional anachronism organically fated to disappear world war or not” (50). By drawing on a range of scholars in agreement with this interpretation—from Oskár Jászi to Alan Taylor, from Robert Kann to Robin Okey—he argues that “scholarship tends to support even some of Gayda’s most extreme assertions” (59).

This gives rise to the major methodological problem of this volume, namely the all too close interweaving of the analysis of Gayda’s journalistic essays and articles with the results of historical research that was often produced later. Yet he didn’t claim to be an unbiased and neutral observer when it came to the “conflict of interests between the Monarchy’s Yugoslav and Italian minorities” (72): he considered Trieste “the key battleground and the focal point of the Italian national struggle in Austria-Hungary and on the Adriatic” (82). As the author himself admits, Gayda was “instrumental in spreading and popularizing a negative image of Austria and Italy’s Slavic neighbors” (207). Rather than trying to understand the layered complexities of the loyalty and identity dynamics, the conflicts and compromises that played out in the Upper Adriatic, Gayda played a significant role in fueling Italian-speaking local liberal nationalist groups’ cultural and demographic panics, delegitimizing the Habsburg Empire and promoting an aggressive policy of the Kingdom of Italy. His collaboration with La Stampa can be considered “an anomaly” (10) only if one takes the opposition between liberalism and nationalism for granted.

Di Iorio’s quite traditional framework tends to downplay the innovative elements introduced by revisionist historiography, and his polemics toward Pieter Judson’s “new history” of the Empire is indirect but evident. National identities—“the Italians,” “the Austrians,” “the Slavs”—are seen as essential forms, and the Habsburg and post-Habsburg experiences in the Upper Adriatic are exclusively understood through the conflicts between national groups. This essentialist view of nations implies a deterministic interpretation of the decline of the Habsburg imperial structure and its final collapse. This historiographical option comes at a high price in the interpretation of Gayda’s role with regard to the construction and legitimization of nationalist, Fascist, and imperialist discourses in the Italian-speaking area of the Upper Adriatic, in the Italian diplomatic and public spheres. Despite the attempt to disentangle them from Gayda’s extreme political options, the same national categories structure the historical narrative of Di Iorio’s book.