The Most Glorified Day: Memory and Narratives on the Normandy Landings in the Italian Daily Press

Abstract

The article focuses on the memory of the Normandy landings in post-war Italy, as a case study for investigating the wider subject of the memory of World War II in the country. It is based on two main assumptions: that memories of World War II were by no means limited to the national level (i.e. to the aspects of the conflict that directly involved Italy) and necessarily included a representation of the global features of the war and that memories often have a transnational nature and undergo a continuous process of importation and exportation beyond national boundaries. In order to investigate the issue, a corpus of sources has been collected, made up of articles published on five Italian newspapers of different political allegiance, roughly in the first two decades after the war, from 1945 to 1968. The results of the analysis show how the memory of the landings was paid very different attention, depending on the cultural and political stance of the daily: while the right- and left-wing press seldom focused on it, the moderate and pro-governmental newspapers showed a greater interest. Two other key elements emerge from the analysis: the transnational character of the memories and their strongly celebratory nature. In fact, many articles on the D-Day drew upon foreign sources (of Anglo-American, but also of German origin) in different ways, and almost all of them depicted the landings as the turning point of the war, the moment when Europe was freed and the final triumph of the good against the evil. In conclusion, it is outlined how the memory of the landings played a key role in making the global war known, in importing to Italy the (western) idea of the ‘good war’ and in spreading in Italy the ‘western’ set of values, thus strengthening the bonds of the country with its Cold War allies.