ABSTRACT
In the preface to Benito Mussolini book, Lamberto Sorrentino referred to the Spanish Civil War as the 'most complex war of religion that humanity has ever seen'. If it is true that Italian correspondents in Spain represented the Civil War as a clash of religions or as the defence of civilization against barbarism, then underlying this representation was a narrative of the march of Fascism towards ultimate victory. If the question of the degree to which the Italian correspondents who followed the war believed in the veracity of their own reporting is complex, then the reception of their writing among the Italian public is even more difficult to assess. Between 1937 and 1939 the Spanish Civil War became, for months at a time, the dominant subject of Italian national daily newspapers — even relegating the chronicling of the colonization of Mussolini's newly acquired African Empire to a secondary position.
