Il diciannovismo degli intellettuali

The composite galaxy of intellectuals coming back home from the WW1 – partly heterogeneous, but animated by a common project before the conflict – after the war it shatters up and everyman seems to take a different path from the others. Let’s first point out the Florentine group of “Lacerba” and, in particular, the three friends and editors Papini, Prezzolini and Soffici. They had conducted the interventionist campaign with the same persuasion, but they had lived the war’s experience in a substantially different way: Papini remained at home, undrafted by the strong myopia; Prezzolini had been in the field’s rear for most of the time; Soffici had fought on the front line experiencing the thrill of victory, but also the discomfort of Caporetto. The case of the futurists is the second and fierrent one: born as a movement aiming to overturn the structures of culture by force, they followed for some time a common path with the Florentine group, so at the outbreak of the war they enlisted en masse, even forming an autonomous company. They had maintained a significant internal coherence, which after the war was reconstituted in the name of a political project to be supported and, to say better, to be gushed from the artistic one. Then there is a new generation of intellectuals, the Twenties’ one, some of whom, after participating the war, run into the Fiume enterprise by opening a different chapter.I will focus, considering to the idea of revolution of this 1919, on two events: the Milan meeting in Piazza Sansepolcro on March 23rd, and the entry into Fiume by d’Annunzio on September 12th. I will analyse some exemplary cases that do not conclude certainly the complex parterre of those who found themselves dealing with this crucial year in Italian history