Tornare in Italia: Come i prigionieri trentini in Russia divennero italiani (1914-1920)

[Machine translation] The book reconstructs the events of the Trentino soldiers who, enlisted by the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, fell prisoner on the Russian front. Tsarist Russia, in an attempt to exploit the national divisions of the Habsburg Empire, proposed that they declare themselves Italian citizens, ready to be sent to Italy to fight against their old homeland. From 1916, the Italian government partially accepted this strategy and sent a military mission to Russia to recover these irredeeming Italians. These policies induced numerous doubts and reflections in the people of Trentino, who until then had recognized themselves mainly in a small community corresponding to their country or at most to the region. Some, through the experience of imprisonment and enlistment in the Black Battalions deployed against the Soviets, acquired a strong sense of Italian belonging and then went on to constitute the hard core of the fascist regime in Italian Trentino. Others, on the other hand, who escaped the processes of Italianization of the prison camps, remained faithful, more than to the Habsburgs, to their small Trentino homeland. The research is based on the analysis of dozens of diaries and memorials written by the soldiers themselves: these documents report the almost epic adventures of the prisoners who knew both the Russian countryside and the Siberian cold, both the regime created by the October Revolution and the strange customs of the Asian populations encountered on their return journey. The role of the Catholic religion emerges from everyone as a central element of personal and collective identities, and as a compass for orienting oneself in the encounter with the other.