The Battle of Vittorio Veneto is presented as a victorious culmination of the war against Austria and as a formative experience whose meaning continued to be contested afterward. Rather than recounting the battle’s full course, the narrative approaches it through the memories of combatants, the arguments that survived the victory, and the public ceremonies that turned wartime death into national symbolism.

A victory recalled through individual service

The clearest personal account belongs to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Before the war, he had celebrated militarism and war in his Futurist writing; in 1915, he left the comforts of his home on Corso Venezia, volunteered for the Alpines, fought, was wounded, and returned to the front. His experience included defeat at Caporetto and, later, triumph at Vittorio Veneto, where he was behind the wheel of a Lancia model 1Z armored car. The narrative thus connects the battle to a change in the poet’s relation to war: he had moved from proclaiming its virtues as a civilian to participating in it himself.

A second account gives the victory a more intimate, bodily aftermath. A soldier who had enlisted voluntarily in Baseggio’s unit was wounded during the fighting on Monte Pertica, a peak on the Monte Grappa battlefield, in the days of Vittorio Veneto. He nevertheless refused medical care and returned to the front; afterward, his service was publicly praised by Baseggio before General Grazioli, and he received a silver medal and a military cross. The narrative identifies his stiffened left hand as a lasting consequence of the war. His account places distinction and injury together: the medals recognized his service, while his body continued to bear its cost.

Victory did not close the argument

The battle’s status as a triumph coexists with continued disputes about how the war had been conducted. When the government inquiry into the military disaster at Caporetto was published, it revived accusations concerning the army high command’s responsibility. The final victory had not erased those questions. The narrative stresses this contrast: even years after the fighting, and despite victory, old antagonisms returned, with political opponents renewing charges and countercharges.

The battle’s memory therefore belongs not only to celebration but also to the unsettled postwar debate. In the wider account of the period, millions of soldiers return to a country where war remains part of the political agenda. The battle stands at the victorious end of their military experience, but it does not by itself resolve the social and political conflicts that follow demobilization.

From battlefield victory to national ritual

The anniversary of victory over the Austrians later provided the setting for the burial of the Unknown Soldier. His body, selected by lot to represent the fallen, was carried across the country by special train before being buried in what the narrative describes as the most solemn ceremony in unified Italy. The unknown identity of the dead soldier made the grave a collective symbol: mourners could approach it as a representative of their own lost relatives, while the ceremony gave public form to a war in which death had become collective and impersonal.

Five days after that burial, the founders of the National Fascist Party gathered in prayer at the soldier’s grave. The juxtaposition is significant: a national commemoration of wartime loss became a site for political ritual. The book links the battle’s remembered victory to this later transformation of military memory into public allegiance, without treating the ceremony as a simple continuation of the battlefield itself.