7 February 2026

Simone Pianetti – anarchist and mass murderer

1914 killer still officially 'on the run'

Simone Pianetti remains officially 'on the run' - after 112 years
Simone Pianetti remains officially
'on the run' - after 112 years
Notorious gunman Simone Pianetti, who has been regarded as a hero by some Italian and American anarchists, was born on this day in 1858 in Camerata Cornello in the province of Bergamo in Lombardy.

In July 1914, Pianetti went out with his rifle one day and shot and killed seven people living in his local area who he believed had wronged him. He then went on the run and, after firing at some Carabinieri officers who tried to arrest him, escaped into the mountains above Bergamo.

A search was carried out by more than 200 officers, from the Polizia di Stato, the Carabinieri and an infantry regiment, to try to capture him, but Pianetti managed to stay hidden in the mountains near the villages of Olmo al Brembo and Cassiglio.

Despite a 'Wanted' poster being published and circulated by the local Prefetto, offering a 5,000 lire reward, Pianetti was never caught and his body was never found.

It is known that when he was young, Pianetti had fired his rifle at his father without injuring him, after an argument over a legacy. He was not charged with any offence as a result and with the agreement of the local head of the Carabinieri, he left Italy and went to the USA.

Years later, he returned to Italy, his journey being paid for by his father, and he went back to live in Camerata Cornello, where he married and fathered seven children.

He opened a small restaurant where customers were also allowed to dance, but because the local parish priest and other church officials did not approve of the dancing at his restaurant, he was eventually forced to close it by the local municipal authorities.


He then opened an electric powered mill, but this also turned out to be an unsuccessful business venture. His reputation was blackened by his enemies and as a result he lost all his money and became impoverished.

As the only person in the area who did not attend church, Pianetti grew to believe that everyone hated him, which led to his murderous rampage in 1914.

A reward of 5,000 lire was offered if Pianetti could be tracked down
A reward of 5,000 lire was offered
if Pianetti could be tracked down
On the morning of 13 July, Pianetti went out with his rifle and a list of the seven people who he believed had contributed towards his business failures and his poverty by either closing him down, or cheating him. 

His victims were the local doctor, Domenico Morali, the manager of the municipality, Abramo Giudici, and his daughter, Valeria, Giovanni Ghilardi, a shoemaker, Stefano Filippo, a priest, Giovanni Giupponi, a layman, and Caterina Milesi, a farmer.

It is thought his actions in 1914 may have been inspired by those of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, who had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the previous month, the famous killings that set off the events that led to the start of World War I.

Pianetti was known to have survived in hiding in the mountains for some time and it is not known when, or where, he eventually died. It is thought that it may have been in 1952 in Milan, but this has never been proved. 

There were reported sightings of him in the Bergamo mountains, as well as in America and Venezuela. 

Some of the local people began to see the fugitive Pianetti as a liberator, and wrote on walls, praising him, with slogans such as ‘Long Live Pianetti, we need one in every town’. 

It is thought people helped him stay hidden from the authorities by giving him food and some residents were later sentenced to terms of imprisonment by the authorities for helping him.

Pianetti hailed from the village of Camerata  Cornello in the Val Brembana area of Lombardy
Pianetti hailed from the village of Camerata 
Cornello in the Val Brembana area of Lombardy
In his absence, Pianetti was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was accompanied by five years in continuous solitary confinement.

Many theories have been put forward about how he escaped justice. Some people claim to have met him years later in either Switzerland or America, and there is a theory that in his old age he returned from America and lived with his son, Nino, in Milan, until he died in 1952.

In later years, Pianetti’s personality came to be admired by some Italian and American anarchists because of his actions against what was perceived to be the bigotry of those in authority in Italy in the religious establishment and society of his time.

He is remembered in towns in the Brembana Valley as a sort of avenger, often referred to as a righter of wrongs, and a kind of elusive hero opposed to the people in authority. The “romantic” aspect of the story prevails, leaving aside the tragic and criminal side, and the threat of “doing like Pianetti”, (in the Bergamo dialect fà de Pianetti ) is still used.

Pianetti’s death has never been recorded and the case against him has never been dropped, so he is now officially on the run aged 168.

The hamlet of Cornello dei Tasso, near Camerata Cornello, is one of Lombardy's most beautiful villages
The hamlet of Cornello dei Tasso, near Camerata
Cornello, is one of Lombardy's most beautiful villages
Travel tip:

Camerata Cornello, where Pianetti was born, is a small municipality in the province of Bergamo in Lombardy about 20km (12 miles) north of the city of Bergamo, in the upper part of the Brembana Valley, with a population of around 550 residents. It is one of the oldest towns in the valley and the first written information about it dates back to the year 1000. It is thought that the first permanent settlements in this area date back to the time of the barbarian invasions, when local populations fled to remote places to escape raids. In the Middle Ages part of fiefdom of the Visconti family, it grew in importance thanks to trade brought by the Via Mercatorum. Its thriving market made it a rival to neighbouring Zogno and San Giovanni Bianco.  In the 13th century the town was the birthplace of several members of the Tasso family, of which the poets Bernardo and Torquato are the most famous. The nearby hamlet of Cornello dei Tasso is among the best preserved and most picturesque in Lombardy.

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The Grand Hotel at San Pellegrino is one of the best known landmarks in the Val Brembana
The Grand Hotel at San Pellegrino is one of the
best known landmarks in the Val Brembana
Travel tip:

The Val Brembana - Brembana Valley - stretches along the River Brembo, from the outskirts of Bergamo into the Orobic Alps. Its landscape is characterised by steep, forested slopes giving way to alpine meadows, with fast-moving rivers coursing through narrow gorges and stone villages clinging to the hillsides above the towns of the valley, the most famous of which is San Pellegrino Terme, the birthplace of San Pellegrino mineral water, also known for its Grand Hotel and Casino, built in the architectural style known as Stile Liberty, the Italian take on Art Nouveau. Val Brembana’s cuisine is hearty, alpine, and draws heavily on local ingredients, particularly its cheeses, including Branzi, made in the village of the same name, Formai de Mut, Averara and Valtorta. Venison and wild boar can be found on menus, inevitably accompanied by polenta, an alpine comfort food made from buckwheat flour, often with local cheese stirred in. 

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More reading:

Carmine Crocco, the bandit seen by peasants as Italy’s ‘Robin Hood’

Giuseppe Musolino, the vengeful killer who became an unlikely folk hero

Gino Lucetti, the anarchist who tried to kill Mussolini

Also on this day:

1497: The Bonfire of the Vanities

1622: The birth of Vittorio della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany

1878: The death of Pope Pius IX

1909: The birth of cavalry officer Amedeo Guillet

1941: The birth of pop singer Little Tony

1952: The birth of rock star Vasco Rossi


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6 February 2026

6 February

Amintore Fanfani - politician

Former prime minister who was Kennedy's inspiration

Amintore Fanfani, a long-serving politician who was five times Italy’s prime minister and had a vision of an Italy run by a powerful centre-left alliance of his own Christian Democrat party and the socialists, was born on this day in 1908.  A controversial figure in that he began his political career as a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, he went on to be regarded as a formidable force in Italian politics, in which he was active for more than 60 years. Throughout his career, or at least the post-War part of it, he was committed to finding a “third way” between collective communism and the free market and became a major influence on centre-left politicians not only in Italy.  The American president John F Kennedy told colleagues that it was reading Fanfani’s book, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, that persuaded him to dedicate his life to politics.  Read more…

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Beatrice Cenci - Roman heroine

Aristocrat's daughter executed for murder of abusive father

Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of an aristocrat whose execution for the murder of her abusive father became a legendary story in Roman history, was born on this day in 1577 in the family's palace off the Via Arenula, not far from what is now the Ponte Garibaldi in the Regola district.  Cenci's short life ended with her beheading in front of Castel Sant'Angelo on 11 September, 1599, with most of the onlookers convinced that an injustice had taken place.  Her father, Francesco Cenci, had a reputation for violent and immoral behaviour that was widely known and had often been found guilty of serious crimes in the papal court. Yet where ordinary citizens were routinely sentenced to death for similar or even lesser offences, he was invariably given only a short prison sentence and frequently bought his way out of jail.  Read more…

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Ugo Foscolo – poet

Revolutionary who expressed his feelings in verse

Writer Ugo Foscolo was born Niccolò Foscolo on this day in 1778 on the island of Zakynthos, now part of Greece, but then part of the Republic of Venice.  Foscolo went on to become a revolutionary who wrote poetry and novels that reflected the feelings of many Italians during the turbulent years of the French revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and Austrian rule. His talent was probably not sufficiently appreciated until after his death, but he is particularly remembered for his book of poems, Dei Sepolcri - Of the Sepulchres.  After the death of his father, Andrea, who was an impoverished Venetian nobleman, the family moved back to live in Venice.  Foscolo went on to study at Padova University and by 1797 had begun to write under the name Ugo Foscolo.  While at University he took part in political discussions about the future of Venice and was shocked when Napoleon handed it over to the Austrians in 1797.  Read more…


1783 Calabria Earthquakes

Series of powerful tremors killed at least 35,000

The Calabrian peninsula of southwest Italy was waking up to the unfolding horror of a sequence of five deadly earthquakes on this day in 1783.  A major tremor destroyed the town of Oppido Mamertina in what is now the province of Reggio Calabria on 5 February, killing almost 1,200 residents, followed by another just after midnight on 6 February, setting off a tsunami that claimed still more lives.   The effects of the first quake  - which has been classified at an estimated 7.0 on the Richter magnitude scale - were felt over a much wider area, however, with countless land and rockslides.  The whole of the island of Sicily is said to have shaken.  In total, it is thought some 180 villages were effectively destroyed, with far more buildings reduced to rubble than remained standing. The city of Messina, on the northeast tip of Sicily, was seriously hit and many casualties were reported there also.  Read more…

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Girolamo Benivieni – poet

Follower of Plato, Dante and Savonarola

The poet Girolamo Benivieni, who turned Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Symposium into verse, was born on this day in 1453 in Florence.  His poem was to influence other writers during the Renaissance and some who came later.  As a member of the Florentine Medici circle, Benivieni was a friend of the Renaissance humanists Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, commonly known as Politian.  Ficino translated The Symposium in about 1474 and wrote his own commentary on the work.  Benivieni summarised Ficino’s work in the poem De lo amore celeste - Of Heavenly Love. These verses then became the subject of a commentary by Pico della Mirandola.  As a result of all these works, Platonism reached such writers as Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione and the English poet, Edmund Spencer.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, by Amintore Fanfani

Amintore Fanfani belonged to the long tradition of Italian Social Catholicism, a movement shaped by papal social teaching and concerned with the moral and social consequences of modern capitalism. This tradition questioned the moral individualism of capitalist society, emphasised the social duties of economic life, and sought to articulate a Catholic alternative to both laissez‑faire capitalism and Marxist socialism. In Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism - originally published in Italy in 1935 as Cattolicesimo e protestantesimo nella formazione storica del capitalismo - Fanfani set out to examine: the essence of capitalism; how religious doctrines shaped economic behaviour, and why Protestant regions historically aligned more closely with capitalist development; and why Catholic teaching traditionally resisted certain capitalist assumptions, especially regarding profit, usury and moral obligations. He argued that capitalism was not simply an economic system but a mentality - a way of viewing work, profit, and society - that Catholic doctrine historically discouraged, emphasising communal welfare and moral limits on economic activity.

Amintore Fanfani was an Italian politician and statesman who served as 32nd prime minister of Italy for five separate terms. He was one of the best-known Italian politicians after the Second World War.

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5 February 2026

5 February

La dolce vita - cinematic masterpiece

Commentary on decadence of 1950s Rome saw Fellini hailed as a genius

La dolce vita, a film still regarded as one of the greatest in cinema history, was screened in front of a paying audience for the first time on this day in 1960.  After a preview before invited guests and media at the Fiamma cinema in Rome, the Capitol Cinema in Milan was chosen for its public premiere. The movie went on general release in Italy the day afterwards and made its London debut on 8 February.  It was shown in America for the first time in April of the following year.  Directed by Federico Fellini, the film won the Palme d'Or, the highest award presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Fellini, although ultimately the production team had to be content with the Oscar for Best Costumes.  It won numerous awards in Italy, while the brilliant Nino Rota’s soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy.  Read more…

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Giovanni Battista Moroni – artist

Portrait painter left visual record of a changing society

Giovanni Battista Moroni, who was considered one of the greatest portrait painters of the 16th century, died on this day in 1578 while working on a painting at a church just outside Bergamo in the northern region of Lombardy.  His wonderful legacy of portraits provides an illuminating insight into life in Italy in the 16th century, as he received commissions from merchants trying to climb the social ladder as well as from rich noblemen.  Moroni was born at Albino near Bergamo somewhere between 1510 and 1522 and went on to train under a religious painter from Brescia, Alessandro Bonvicino.  Although Moroni painted many acclaimed religious works, he became known much more for the vitality and realism of his portraits, for which he was once praised by Titian.  Some of Moroni’s work is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the National Gallery in London.  Read more…

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Cesare Maldini - footballer and coach

Enjoyed success with AC Milan as player and manager

The footballer and coach Cesare Maldini, who won four Serie A titles and an historic European Cup as a centre half with AC Milan and later coached the club with success in domestic and European football, was born on this day in 1932 in Trieste.  When, under Maldini’s captaincy, Milan beat Benfica 2–1 at Wembley Stadium in London in May 1963, they became the first Italian club to win the European Cup and Maldini the first Italian captain to lift the trophy.  Maldini’s international career included an 18-month spell as coach of the Italy national team, during which the Azzurri reached the quarter-finals of the 1998 World Cup. He had earlier won three consecutive European championships as coach of the Italy Under-21s. He is the father of Paolo Maldini, the former AC Milan defender whose record-breaking career spanned 25 years. Read more…

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Giovanni Capurro - poet and songwriter

Neapolitan who wrote the words to ‘O sole mio

Giovanni Capurro, a poet and songwriter best known for writing the lyric of the classic Neapolitan song ‘O sole mio, was born in Naples on this day in 1859.  The son of a professor of languages, Capurro was a cultured man who would in time be considered one of the 19th century’s finest Italian poets, yet was never well rewarded for his art. He spent much of his working life as a journalist and died poor.  Capurro grew up in the Montecalvario district of Naples, an area of the city centre that climbs up the hill of San Martino to the west of Via Toledo. Although his first love was writing, and poetry in particular, he was also a talented musician, graduating from the Naples Conservatory after studying the flute. He was also blessed with a good singing voice.  He wrote poetry in both Italian and Neapolitan dialect, both in the form of song lyrics and volumes of poetry. Read more…


Premiere of Verdi’s Otello

Composer’s penultimate opera prompted 20 curtain calls

Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello, the penultimate work of his outstanding career, was staged for the first time at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala theatre on this day in 1887.  The four-act opera, based on the play Othello by William Shakespeare, came into being only after a long campaign by Verdi’s publisher, Giulio Ricordi, and the librettist Arrigo Boito, to persuade Italy’s greatest opera composer to come out of his unofficial retirement.  Verdi effectively called time on his writing career after the success of Aida in 1871. It was his 28th opera and his success had enabled him to become a wealthy landowner. Although his Requiem was to come in 1874, he was reluctant to commit himself to any new works.  It took Ricordi and Boito eight years from first suggesting to Verdi that he wrote an opera based on Othello to it actually coming to fruition.  Read more…

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Carolina Morace - footballer and coach

Prolific goalscorer first woman in Italian Football Hall of Fame

Footballer and coach Carolina Morace, the first woman to be inducted into the Italian Football Hall of Fame, was born on this day in 1964 in Venice.  Morace played for 20 years for 10 different clubs and was the leading goalscorer in the Women's Serie A on 12 occasions, including an incredible run of 11 consecutive seasons from 1987 to 1998.   She won the Italian championship 12 times with eight of her clubs and scored an extraordinary 550 goals at an average of three in every two games at her peak, with a further 105 goals in 153 appearances for the Italy national team.  Four of those came in one match when Italy Women played England in a curtain-raiser to the pre-season Charity Shield game at Wembley in 1990, which she described as one of her proudest moments.  Morace, the daughter of a former officer in the Italian Navy, grew up a stone’s throw away from Venice's football ground at Sant' Elena. Read more…

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Saint Agatha of Sicily – Christian martyr

Huge crowds turn out for feast day in Catania

One of the largest festivals in the Roman Catholic calendar takes place on this day every year to celebrate the life of the Christian martyr Saint Agatha of Sicily.   In Catania, which adopted her as the patron saint of the city, hundreds of thousands of people line the streets to watch the extraordinary sight of up to 5,000 citizens hauling a silver carriage said to weigh 20 tons (18,140kg), bearing a huge statue and containing the relics of the saint, who died on this day in 251 AD.  The procession follows a route from Piazza del Duomo that takes in several city landmarks and ends, after a long climb along the Via Antonino di Sangiuliano at Via Crociferi.  The procession begins in the afternoon and finishes deep into the night.  There is an enormous fireworks display that takes place when the procession reaches Piazza Cavour.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Cinema of Federico Fellini, by Peter Bondanella

This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C G Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini's entire career, The Cinema of Federico Fellini links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neorealist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director's growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini's important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s. By probing Fellini's recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director's body of work and discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini's reputation as a storyteller and entertainer. After two chapters on Fellini's precinematic career, the book covers all the films to date in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema, literature and cinema, Fellini and politics, Fellini and the image of women, and La voce della luna and the cinema of poetry.

Until his retirement in 2007, Peter Bondanella was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Film Studies, and Italian at Indiana University. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Arts and past President of the American Association for Italian Studies, Bondanella wrote numerous books and articles on Italian literature and cinema and translated or edited a number of Italian literary classics.

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4 February 2026

4 February

Cesare Battisti – patriot and irredentist

Campaigner for Trentino hailed as national hero

Cesare Battisti, a politician whose campaign to reclaim Trentino for Italy from Austria-Hungary was to cost him his life, was born on this day in 1875 in the region’s capital, Trento.  As a member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Battista was elected to the assembly of South Tyrol and the Austrian Imperial Council, where he pushed for autonomy for Trentino, an area with a mainly Italian-speaking population.  When the First World War arrived and Italy decided to side with the Triple Entente and fight against Austria-Hungary, Battisti decided he could fight only on the Italian side, joining the Alpini corps.  At this time he was still a member of the Austrian Chamber of Deputies, so when he was captured wearing Italian uniform during the Battle of Asiago in 1916 he was charged with high treason and executed.  Italy now looks upon Battisti as a national hero. Read more…

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Ugo Betti - playwright

Judge who combined writing with legal career

Ugo Betti, a playwright whose works exploring facets of the human condition are considered by some to be the finest plays written by an Italian after Luigi Pirandello, was born on this day in 1892 in Camerino in Le Marche.  Betti wrote 27 plays, mainly concerned with evil, guilt, justice, atonement and redemption, largely in his spare time alongside a career in the legal profession.  Although he started life in what was then a remote town in the Apennine mountains, about 75km (47 miles) inland from the Adriatic coast and a similar distance from the city of Perugia, Betti moved with his family at an early age to Parma in Emilia-Romagna.  He followed his older brother Emilio in studying law, although his progress was interrupted when he was enlisted as a volunteer in the army after Italy entered the First World War. Read more…

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Alessandro Magnasco - painter

Artist known for eerie scenes and lifelike figures

The painter Alessandro Magnasco, who became famous for populating eerie landscapes with exaggeratedly realistic figures to illustrate the darker sides of society in his lifetime, was born on this day in 1667 in Genoa.  He specialised in wild and gloomy landscapes and interiors, often crowded with figures such as bandits and beggars, sometimes soldiers, monks or nuns in chaotic scenes, and acquired a substantial following.  His work was especially popular with wealthy families in Milan and Florence, where he worked primarily, and regular lucrative commissions enabled him to become wealthy himself.  Magnasco’s father, Stefano, was a modestly successful painter in Genoa and it is likely Alessandro would have remained in the Ligurian city had his father not died suddenly when he was only three years old.  Read more…


Eugenio Corti - soldier and writer

Author drew on his experiences on the front line

Eugenio Corti, the writer most famous for his epic 1983 novel The Red Horse, died on this day in 2014 at the age of 93.  He passed away at his home in Besana in Brianza in Lombardy, where he had been born in January 1921.  The Red Horse, which follows the life of the Riva family in northern Italy from Mussolini's declaration of war in the summer of 1940 through to the 1970s, covers the years of the Second World War and the evolution of Italy's new republic.  Its themes reflect Corti's own view of the world, his unease about the totalitarianism of fascism and communism, his faith in the Christian Democrats to tread a confident path through the conservative middle ground, and his regret at the decline in Christian values in Italy.  It has been likened to Alessandro Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi - The Betrothed. Read more…

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Giacomo Facco – composer

The forgotten talent of the musician from Padua

Giacomo Facco, a Baroque composer, was born on this day in 1676 in Marsango, a small town just north of Padua.  Highly regarded during his own lifetime, he was completely forgotten about until 1962 when his work was rediscovered by Uberto Zanolli, a musicologist.  Facco is believed to have worked as a violinist and a conductor and he is known to have been given a job in 1705 by the Viceroy of Sicily as a choirmaster, teacher and violinist in Palermo.  In 1708 he moved with the Viceroy to Messina where he composed The Fight between Mercy and Incredulity. In 1710 he presented a work dedicated to King Philip V of Spain, The Augury of Victories, in Messina Cathedral.  By 1720 it is known Facco was working in the Spanish court because his pay is mentioned in a report dating from that year. He is later named as clavichord master to the Spanish princes.  Read more…

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Saint Maria De Mattias - educator

Woman trapped by wealth who set up religious order

Maria De Mattias, whose ambition to serve Christ and to see women given the chance to receive a formal education led her to set up a religious order, was born on this day in 1805 in Vallecorsa, a village in a mountainous region of southern Lazio.  De Mattias, who died in Rome in 1866, was beatified in 1950 by Pope Pius XII and made a saint in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. The Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ, which she established in 1834, now has a membership of more than 2,000, with communities in South America, the United States, Southeast Asia and Africa as well as Italy.  During more than 30 years travelling throughout Italy to help establish communities of her Sisters, De Mattias founded nearly 70 schools, often in remote towns and rural areas of Italy. The young Maria had an upbringing said to have been happy for the most part but subject to constraints.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Caporetto and the Isonzo Campaign: The Italian Front, 1915-1918, by John MacDonald and Zeljko Cimpric

From May 1915 to October 1917 the armies of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire were locked into a series of twelve battles along the River Isonzo, a sixty-mile front from the Alps to the Adriatic. The campaign was fought in the most appalling terrain for combat, with horrendous casualties on both sides, often exceeding those of the more famous battles of the Great War. Yet this massive struggle is too often neglected in histories of the war which focus on the fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts. In Caporetto and the Isonzo Campaign: The Italian Front, 1915-1918, John Macdonald aims to set the record straight. His description of the Isonzo battles, of the battlefields and of the atrocious conditions in which the soldiers lived and fought is supported by a graphic selection of original photographs that record the terrible reality of the conflict. 

John Macdonald was a distinguished management theorist, consultant and lecturer. His special interest in the Great War and the fighting on the Italian Front in particular was inspired by a visit to the battlefields in Slovenia and Italy. He completed this book shortly before he died in 2011.

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