A Military History of Italy (review)

It is rare for the same book to be reviewed twice in the same journal. However, Ciro Paoletti’s study of the military history of Italy since the Renaissance – or rather from the start of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) – now published in Praeger’s series of national military histories was earlier reviewed in this journal when first published by the Historical Service of the Italian army in 2002 as Gli Italiani in Armi. Paoletti aims to present a general survey of Italian military history from the start of the modern era to the present. And this is what the reader gets. Not surprisingly, the coverage favours the more recent past: more or less half the book covers the more than 300 years to the creation of the kingdom of Italy in 1861, the other half deals with the 150 years since that time, including Italy’s colonial wars, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and the current “War on Terror”. But Paoletti also has another agenda. He is particularly concerned to defend Italy and the Italians from a neglect of their military history which he attributes to ignorance and prejudice. This is really the only polemical aspect of the book. While aware of narrower debates within the subject – for example Greg Hanlon’s work on the supposed decline of the military traditions of the Italian nobility (or nobilities) in the early modern period – Paoletti eschews engaging in largely academic polemics and the text is punctuated by very few references, confined to endnotes. There is a bibliography but it identifies only some of the more than 8,000 titles – and none of the archival sources – which Paoletti has apparently used. Inevitably, there are minor errors, dates and so on. More serious is the treatment of important conflicts particularly in the earlier period, before 1800. Thus the important alpine campaigns of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy during the second half of the War of the Spanish Succession, which have helped shape modern Italy, are missing while the War of the Polish Succession - in which the Austrian Habsburg position came close to complete collapse in Italy, and in which a Bourbon dynasty was established in Naples and Sicily which would survive until the arrival of Garibaldi’s Redshirts – gets just two pages. Occasionally the interpretation seems speculative: there is a case for claiming as Paoletti does that forcing Victor Amadeus II of Savoy to exchange Sicily for Sardinia in 1720 paved the way for the triumph of the Mafia on the larger island but this is largely conjectural. The writing is very largely free of jargon but unfortunately reading it is more trying than it should be because of the infelicities of the translation from the Italian original; good copy-editing should have sorted this out. Paoletti will disappoint those looking for a nuanced, analytical history of war in Italy in the period covered, and/or one which offers new interpretations of specific episodes or of Italian military history as a whole, apart from the broader polemic identified above. But his book is certainly worth reading by those who are looking for a simple – sometimes it must be said rather breathless – potted narrative of Italian military history over the last 500 years.