The “missing part” of Gioacchino Volpe’s historiography on the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the difficult circumstances faced by Gioacchino Volpe in the immediate post-war period, whilst he was conducting research – on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation – into the Italian people in the context of the First World War: the historian was denied access to public archives. The report from the Archival Superintendency, forwarded to the political authorities of the time - represented by the Mussolini government which had come to power in the autumn of the previous year - criticised the fact that the research conducted by the historian from Abruzzo had appeared “too biased” towards a series of documents concerning workers, strikes and defeatism in general, collected during the war by the Historiographical Office of Industrial Mobilisation headed by Giovanni Borelli, of which Volpe himself had been a member.