The First Page: Emigrant Soldiers

THE FIRST PAGE

Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad
in the First World War

by Selena Daly

9 October 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 14 October 2025, Selena Daly will present her new book, Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War, in which she reconstructs the fates of four (of the over 300,000) men who returned to Italy from the United States, Brazil, France, and Britain to perform their conscripted military service. What happened to these emigrant soldiers following their arrival and once the war had ended? Daly looked at letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and diplomatic reports and delivered a new global account of Italians during the First World War.

At the port of Tunis in June 1915, a barefoot boy sits on an overturned barrel and plays the mandolin. Nearby a man stands impassively, a squat woollen hat perched on his head, one hand casually resting in the pocket of his voluminous sarouel pants, the other holding a cigar as thick as the moustache that adorns his face. Beside him, only his wife’s eyes can be seen beneath her black face-veil. They gaze at the chaotic scene unfolding around them. The pier is thronged with hundreds of exuberant Italian men carrying small suitcases and making their way towards the dark hulk of the awaiting steamship. Accompanied by a marching band playing drums, cymbals and tubas, the men stride forward, waving flags. Two smartly dressed ladies run alongside the crowd trying to catch a final glimpse of their loved ones as a woman struggles to retain her grip on two young children and a toddler, and another kisses her husband farewell as he prepares to set sail across the Mediterranean (Figure 1.1). These men were the first Italian emigrants to depart from Tunisia to serve at the frontline in Italy’s war against Austria-Hungary. Similar jubilant scenes of departure played out at train stations and ports all over the world following Italy’s declaration of war on 23 May 1915, as Italian emigrants gathered to answer their country’s call to arms. In total, over 300,000 Italian emigrants would return to Italy to complete their conscripted military service during the First World War. It is on the experiences of these men that this book focuses.

The scene at Tunis – a North African port city in a French colony that was home to thousands of Italian emigrants – was captured in a drawing published in the London-based Illustrated War News, which provides an indication of this phenomenon’s transnational scope and highlights the international significance of the unprecedented departure of hundreds of thousands of emigrants to support the Allied war effort. The mobilisation of Italian emigrants constituted a major global news story in the war reporting of summer 1915: stories of these departures filled column inches in newspapers from Nice to New York, from Sydney to Suez, from Buenos Aires to Boston.

Emigrant Soldiers. Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War was published by Cambridge University Press in June 2025.

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SELENA DALY is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at University College London. Her research explores modern Italy with a focus on the history of Italian emigration. Previous publications include Italian Futurism and the First World War (2016), which was shortlisted for The Bridge Book Award 2017. She is currently writing a trade book about the global history of Italian emigration from Marco Polo to today, to appear with Viking Penguin, Hodder & Stoughton, and Mondadori in 2028.

On 14 October 2025 Selena Daly will launch her new book Emigrant Soldiers at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: ‘The Italian Army on the Italian Front, 1915-1918’. Photographer: W J Brunell.
Source: the Imperial War Museum.