"O la vittoria, o tutti accoppati" / "We either win, or we all die"
I've been searching for books or histortial accounts about the Arditi for around a year now and I've not been able to find adequate works on them. I'm primarily looking for anything regarding their entire history, the roles they played in war and peace time Italy, and ESPECIALLY any by ex-members or that have first hand accounts of their activities.
I was wondering, or hoping is perhaps a better word to use, that someone here may know of any. My next port of call is to start tracking down WWI historians from Italy's universities via phone/email. I am a born and raised Yorkshireman but my old man is Italian. Unfortunately I haven't seen much of him since I was around 10 years of age, meaning I never had the opportunity to really pick the language up - making it an uphill struggle to get in touch with them and have decent communication (exasperated further by a broad Yorkshire accent!!). I am committed to doing so if needs be though.
Thanks!
There is a large, large number of Arditi memorials and literature concerning the arditi, given their influence in the rise of Fascism, the role some of them played in the Fascist Regime, their primary influence in the attempted D'Annunzio coup in Fiume as well as the numerous anti-socialist "actions" in the post war years.
Unfortunately, for those same reasons, those works - either celebratory written in the 1930s or somewhat revisionist written after WW2 - are for the most part relegated to fascist or para-fascist memorabilia. The best way to find one around here is to look in the "fascism" area of flea markets. I am really not aware of english translations and most of them are out of print and hard to find even in local libraries - unless you are looking for a somewhat noteworthy local ardito.
You may find something about Mario Carli perhaps - who was the founder of the Arditi Association and the most influential figure of the movement; and also a prolific writer himself, being editor of quite a few papers up until his death in the 1935.
That said, various works touch on the Arditi indirectly, especially those dealing with the so called "national radicalism" - among those you may consider the recent work of Emilio Gentile and look for available translations that would at least provide you with some background on the environment where the Arditi developed their peculiar world view.