Bombardements et destructions d'églises en Italie pendant la Grande Guerre

This paper addresses a topic – Italian churches destroyed or damaged by bombing during the Great War – that has generally been relegated to art history, without being addressed in its deeper political and cultural implications. Yet, historiography has recognized the importance of ecclesiastical space in the management of mass mourning and the spread of “war religion”. Targeted by the war totalization that affected civilians, sacred buildings were themselves traces and testimonies of a landscape radically transformed by the unprecedented violence of industrial warfare. The paper, in particular, focuses on the action of the “Opera di soccorso per le chiese rovinate dalla guerra” and the “Opera per la ricostruzione delle chiese lungo il Piave” between WWI and the rise of fascism. Long the object of propaganda, the devastated churches maintained their function as important symbols of identity, constituting one of the many channels of a politicization aimed at rediscovering or, more appropriately, creating a Catholic nation for postwar Italy.