This volume presents the results, in some cases partial and provisional, of three archival research and survey projects financed by the Servizio alle attività culturali della Provincia Autonoma di Trento, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e di Rovereto, and the Dipartimento di Lettere dell'Università degli Studi di Trento. The parallel development of the projects has, when taken as a whole, given shape to potentially one of the most significant historical research experiences on World War I undertaken in Italy in the context of the Centenary. Primarily because it involved, as Marco Mondini has observed, the formation of the first Italian multidisciplinary academic research team specializing on the subject, and the successful participation of several institutions, including the Italian-German Historical Institute, the Bruno Kessler Foundation, the University of Trento, and the Provincial Authority of Trento. Secondly because the essay writers and researchers in charge of project creation have followed a transnational approach to address their respective study topics. In this way, the issues and problems raised by international literature on the Great War from the last decades are acknowledged, and cultural history and mentality are respected. The common analytical focus between the essays is the experience of the Italian-speaking population of South Tyrol and Trentino during the First World War, a case believed to be of great international interest by the research projects’ promoters due to the conflict's impact on the physical, psychological, and political conditions of a minority on the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Further points of interest are the cultural and emotional legacy the conflict left in the first postwar period.

Clearly, the themes visited in some of these essays have been previously published. Trentino's historiographers have, in fact, been dealing with them from the 1980s up to the current context of the Centenary celebrations in a series of essays, monographs, and publications—in particular the journal Materiali di lavoro, the popular archive publication at the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino in Trento, and the Laboratorio di storia in Rovereto—which are still considered indisputably solid sources and an indispensable reference point in the academic community. Compared to the historiographic experience developed by the previous generation's historians, in which considerable (but not exclusive) space was given to subjective sources, a “bottom-up” perspective in the study of the First World War in relation to Trentino and its population, researchers Francesco Frizzera, Simone Attilio Bellezza, and Alessandro Salvador have attempted to reexamine the problems of the civil population's displacement and the oft-debated issue of the Trentino population's national identity. The writers’ different perspectives are based on a wider reference to mostly unpublished institutional sources found in the state archives of Rome, Vienna, and Moscow, in addition to—as has already been pointed out—the most recent international studies on World War I.

This attempt is particularly successful in Frizzera's essay, in which he proposes the historiography on refugee studies as a context in which to interpret the case of refugees in Trentino. His text highlights the field's potential as an analytical reference point for studying the phenomenon of European population displacement during the Great War. In fact, the political and military circumstances emerging in May 1915 obliged the population of the territory bordering the Kingdom of Italy (235,000 people, of which 105,000 were Trentini) to move under the control of authorities in two opposite directions. That is, either toward the internal regions of the Hapsburg monarchy or into the Italian peninsula, thus sharing the experience of bidirectional displacement regarding the place of origin experienced by other European border communities (e.g., Ruthenians, Poles, Serbs, and French). The author also draws attention to the hybrid and undefined nature of the conditions of refugees in Trentino (Frizzera uses the term “conceptual continuum” between the different categories of refugees: displaced, confined, and interned), which enabled the Hapsburg state bureaucracy to employ different forms of aid in a completely discretionary and arbitrary manner. Such assistance was always conditioned by—or even subordinate to—the politico-military requirements for controlling and repressing dissent, especially when national revindication was the motivating factor.

The contributions of Bellezza and Salvador, dedicated respectively to the problem of national identity and the loyalty of Austro-Italian soldiers captured in Russia, appear less innovative than the historical studies carried out on the same topics in the last decades. However, the two researchers make a noteworthy contribution to the issue with the new archival documentation they have identified. Bellezza, after confirming that the Trentini more closely identify with a regional rather than national homeland, focuses on the complex interaction between the dynamics of different sources of Italian national identity creation. The Italian Embassy in Russia intervened from the top down, while soldiers with deep-rooted Italian national sentiment acted from the bottom up by organizing propaganda. Simultaneously, further nationalistic sentiment was fostered in the Kirsanov internment camp. The adhesion to Italian patriotism by the prisoners, however, appears conditioned, observes Bellezza—more an opportune survival strategy than an authentic process of national identity construction. In his chapter, Salvador focuses on the Italian and Habsburg authorities’ perception of nationalism and irredentism: the latter did not show particular concern about the loyalty of Italian soldiers imprisoned in Russia (about 15,000), while in the aftermath of the October Revolution, they perceived the problem of subversive propaganda being spread among prisoners of war in anticipation of their repatriation.

Three further contributions show promise for future research development. The first is Anna Grillini's chapter on the difficult reintegration of veterans and women into Trentino's postwar society, in light of archive materials from Pergine's psychiatric institution. Grillini's text also deals with the mass education role attributed to psychiatric hospitals. The second contribution comes from Alessandro Livio on the administration of the Italian-speaking population's internment during World War I. The third one is Francesca Brunet's take on the archives of Austrian military tribunals conserved at the State Archive in Trento. Livio's contribution is a meticulous historical-institutional reconstruction of the exceptional laws drawn up in case of war and adopted by Austria-Hungary after the promulgation of the Basic Laws of December 1867. The chapter analyzes the wartime measures for imprisoning subjects considered politically suspect and the so-called enemy aliens, or citizens of enemy states, all coordinated through the War Surveillance Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt, which has already been written about by Tamara Scheer). The chapter also focuses on the repercussions of such measures. Francesca Brunet's chapter has not only the character of a careful historical-archival report on the military judicial sources conserved in Trento (the documentation, rearranged by the essay author and Nicola Zini, covers the period between 1871 and 1918) but also convincingly demonstrates the vast potential offered by the study of that type of source (including subjective and musical testimonies). The essay, based on the most recent historiographic developments and examinations of samples of trial files, provides valuable insights into common crimes between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the phenomenon of leniency in relation to the migratory phenomenon, the relationship between garrisons and civil society, the activity of military justice in repressing political crimes during World War I, and the use of a militarized workforce.

Marco Mondini's concluding essay paints a harsh picture of Italian historiography on the Great War, in which the generation of historians in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally contributed to the definitive replacement of nationalistic, “patriotic” narration with a “bottom-up” rereading of the conflict (mainly, although not exclusively, through popular autobiographical writing). This is contrasted with a generation of young researchers (the so-called transactional generation) who are decidedly open toward the most recent international historiography. According to the author, this division between the two generations of historians has prevented—and still prevents—the compilation of comprehensive Great War narratives in Italy, while a positive evaluation is given to the role played by the media, museums, and, partly, institutions dedicated to popularizing history, all in the context of the Centenary.

These considerations deserve a more detailed and profound discussion than the small space a review allows. I only wonder if, on the one hand, Mondini's is not an excessively severe judgment against the late twentieth century's so-called historiography of dissent, which in my opinion—and Mondini admits—was not completely closed to international literature (think only of the crucial experience of the 1985 conference La Grande Guerra: Esperienza, memoria, immagini); while, on the other hand, doubt remains about excessive trust in the media's potential for popularizing history, considering the risk of trivialization, not to mention the distortion, of narratives and interpretations.