ITALIAN SOLDIERS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The essay deals with some aspects of migratory phoenomena which can be associated with the origin and endurance of the sense of ethnic and national identity. Beside the growing removal of the old mechanisms of language education, which remove the Italian language -where originally owned-and cause its gradual and partly physiological replacement, we can see with Castillan in America, by integration, the decline of "political Italian character" (i.e. "Italianity" or Italian identity). A turning point before such process of Argentinian metamorphosis ("Argentinianization") finally established, was marked by the economic trends during World War 1. Its breaking out, in fact, coincided with the moment of utmost expansion (not only in Buenos Aires) of the foreign migratory particularly Italian-presence. Unlike what would later happen with World War 2, yet after nearly a twenty-year break in the incoming flow, between 1914 and 1918 we can see a tangible form of double patriotism or dual political-institutional loyalty from the migratory ethnic groups, within whom some choices arouse, such as the decision -which many of their members made-to enlist under the "old homeland's" flags to reach the European battlefields.