Sports and the Military in Italian Newspapers from the First World War

The paper proposes to illustrate the proximity between sports and war in Italy during the First World War through newspaper articles, especially the sports journalism. The war as portrayed in the newspapers differed gravely from the anonymous experience of mass war that is described in diaries and history handbooks. This can be explained by two factors: on the one hand, wartime censorship did not allow journalist to truly portray the war with facts (as Isnenghi says, without facts, reporters are left with nothing but the rhetoric of heroism): on the other hand, a newly arisen sports journalism considered sports a preparation for war. This conviction is well represented in the magazine, Lo sport illustrato, originally a weekly illustrated supplement of La Gazzetta dello Sport, which expressed its attitude towards the Italian intervention by changing its name to Lo sport illustrato e la guerra at the beginning of the war.