On this day: December 1944

From the collection of the Imperial War Museum

7th December 1944: A British jeep passes a sign on the side of the road in Ravenna in Northern Italy warning people not to loot. It optimistically suggests the Second World War would end soon.

The Allies had many reasons to believe this to be true. Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been arrested and dismissed the year before, and the Allies had worked their way through the country, defeating Axis powers.

The war would end a few months after this photograph was taken.

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On this day: Anti-Semitism in Italy

This is the cover of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera from the 11th of November, 1938. The headline announces the country’s fascist government approving Italian Racial Laws, which discriminated against a number of groups and stripped Jews of their citizenship, barring them from many institutions.

While Italy didn’t have the significant Jewish population of some other areas of Europe, dictator Benito Mussolini fell into line with Adolf Hitler on racial policies. Italy aligned itself with Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

100 Years Ago: the end of a war

2nd November 1918: Nine days before the end of the First World War, British and Italian convoys pass abandoned Austro-Hungarian artillery on a mountain road.

The photograph was taken during the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, in Italy’s north.

The battle concluded the following day, marking both an Italian victory and the end of the war on the Italian front.

On this day: the death of Pope Pius IX

Pope Pius IX, head of the Catholic Church, died in the Apostolic Palace in Rome on the 7th of February, 1878.

Photographed in the 1860s

Born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti in 1792, the Italian port town of Senigallia, Pius IX became the longest-running elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, with a papacy that lasted for over thirty-one years, from the 16th of June, 1846 until his death.

The Pope was beatified on the 3rd of September, 2000.

The aftermath of a battle.

The region of Nervesa della Battaglia in northern Italy was retaken from the Austro-Hungarians in June of 1918.

This photograph was taken as Italian forces returned to the region to survey the destruction.

On this day: the downing of Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870

The recovered wreckage in 2007. X

On the 27^th of June, 1980, Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 disappeared from the sky during a flight from Bologna to Palermo, Italy.

The plane crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea, killing all eighty-one people on board.

While it was concluded by British investigators that a bomb on the aircraft caused the disaster, to this day Italian officials insist a missile was fired at the plane.

The disaster occurred in the middle of a wave of terrorist acts to hit Italy (such as the Bologna Bombing), fuelled by far left and right-wing groups in the country’s north.

On this day: Preparing for Battle

This photograph, dated the 24th of June, 1918, shows Italian troops at 10am, waiting for battle.

They are in the commune of Nervesa, in the northern Italian Veneto region, an area that was largely destroyed in battle in the days immediately before.

The soldiers retook the region from the Austro-Hungarians.