Notes on Moise Itzhak Di Capua ""Dio, Vittoria, l'Italia invocando.."

The Battle of Caporetto, also known as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, remains the worst defeat suffered by the Italian army to date. It began at two o’clock in the morning on 24 October 1917 on the Isonzo front and was fought between the Italian army and the combined forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Reich.

Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era ed. J. Macleod , 2008

Although Italy was one of the victorious allies in 1918, cultural and social memory of the First World War often focused on a sense of bitterness or perceived victimhood. Prioritising the humiliating defeat at the battle of Caporetto in 1917 within the national narrative of the war helped to underline the sense of the "mutilated victory" after the disappointments of the Paris Peace Conference. This article analyses the ways in which Caporetto was perceived and commemorated in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. A model of redemptive sacrifice allowed a triumphal reworking of this most traumatic of defeats.

Forlì was, and still seems to be in some sense, the "città del Duce", the city of Mussolini; Predappio, where he was born and lived for a long time, is few kms away. Moreover, in Forlì there was a massacre, in September 1944, of Jews (and non Jews alike), which can be ranked as the third major one in Italy (following the one in Meina, on Lago Maggiore, in September 1943; and the one in Pisa, in the house of Pardo Roques, in August 1944) 1 .

Journal of Jewish Identities, 2022

2019

2000 of Italian-Jewish History, Keynote Lecture held at the Annual Conference of the Association of European Jewish Museums / AEJM, Ferrara 2019

Italian Culture , 2022

This article argues that recognizing Jewishness as a crucial part of modern Italian literary history offers one path for discussing the current and historical diversity of Italian culture. The first section discusses key twentieth-century Italian authors — Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, and Italo Svevo — not to assess how Jewish they are, but to illuminate the Jewishness of modern Italian literature, which prompts a reconsideration of the construction of Italian identity. The second section, “Jewish, Black, and Italian: The Archival Fictions of Helena Janeczeck, Claudio Magris, and Igiaba Scego,” scrutinizes how these three authors interrogate Italy’s role in the persecution of Jews, racial violence, and colonialism, drawing on historical documents that show the gaps in dominant discourses and asking readers to reflect on how historical narratives have been constructed. Being more cognizant of Jewish Italians, their backgrounds, and their representations in literature contributes to the growing analyses of Italy’s diversity, adding to examinations of Italian literature that focus on belonging, borders, migration, and colonialism.

Operation Barbarossa and its Aftermath: New Approaches to a Complex Campaign, 2024

The Italian Army’s involvement in antipartisan warfare and in anti-Jewish persecutions on the eastern front in 1941-43 has been so far understudied. This depends partly on the difficult task to find out archival sources, partly on the incomparably major part the Germans played in such activities, partly on the idea that Italian soldiers were “by nature” far from displaying such violence. Recent studies and unpublished sources, really, stress how the Regio Esercito took a firm part both on the war against the Soviet partisans and on the anti-Jewish repression. Such facts in Italy were almost totally removed from national collective memory thanks to the fact that the new Italian government broke off the alliance with nazi Germany in Summer 1943 and to the following achivement of the Resistenza, which was actually comparable to the one Italian soldiers had opposed abroad in 1941-43.