UNGHERESI SULLA TRADOTTA: L’ITALIA META DI VIAGGIO VERSO IL FRONTE NELLA PRIMA GUERRA MONDIALE

Abstract

<p><br /> </p> <em>Hungarians traveling in a military train: Italy as travel destination to the front in the First World War</em><br /> <em></em>The novel “Doberdo” by Máté Zalka, a literary work that has strongly captured the attention of the Hungarian readers in the second post-war period, contributing to the "popularization" of some Italian place-names clearly present in the Hungarian imagery (with Doberdo, Isonzo and Piave are the most frequent, even in some popular songs still very famous today), begins with a journey on the <em>ridotta</em> (military train), a journey with a not always know destination, from which one is not always sure to return, a journey that creates a period of suspension before the imminent war action. The vision of the Italian front (the <em>Carso</em>) during the First World War is one of the reasons, in Hungarian literature, of a radical change from the previous experiences of Hungarian writers in Italy: starting from 1915 they go towards the borders of Italy to "defend the homeland", to write war correspondences that exalt the warlike virtue of the “KuK” army (but above all of the royal ones), to describe the sometimes disastrous state in which the bombed cities find themselves almost to the ground (as in the case of Gorizia). How much Italy has changed compared to the previous visions of the <em>Italo-maniacs</em>, those who had found their new homeland in Rome, Florence, Venice