ABSTRACT
The only Italian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907, Ernesto Teodoro Moneta was an exponent of those nineteenth-century doctrines which indicate the useful and necessary means to ensuring a lasting peace between states in international arbitration and in the European Federation. In 1911 and 1914, in a change of heart that many found sudden and unexpected, Moneta first sided with the Italian invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, Italy's participation in the First World War, claiming patriotism as a priority over peace. The institutional, political and moral model that Europe should follow, in Moneta's opinion, was the Swiss Confederation, capable of peacefully bringing together populations that spoke different languages and were of different cultures, into a single political entity. In 1911 Moneta had an unexpected change of heart that seemed to betray his commitment to peace: he approved the war against Turkey and, from columns of La Vita Internazionale, he joined the press campaign to support the aggression.
