The Great War was an exceptional and all-encompassing event. The number of men and boys of enlistment age who were called up to enlist was slightly less than six million and considering that at that time there were slightly more than seven and a half million Italian families, it can be said that almost all families had a relative on the war front.
But certainly the Great War involved directly or indirectly the whole Italian population, including women and children. After 1915 it was in fact necessary to support the war both economically and ideologically and to prevent a resigned feeling of defeat and pacifist positions from spreading. Customs, work, social relationships and culture changed significantly compared to the pre-war period with the birth of the home front: "Everybody - regardless of the social class to which a person belonged and professional status - had to feel committed without any hesitation." (Antonio Gibelli, La Grande Guerra degli Italiani, BUR, Milan, 2009, page 174).
A case in point was the Industrial Mobilization, an organization that was promoted to control industrial production for the war effort and recruit manpower. As a result of this initiative, women appeared for the first time in metal working and mechanical factories in view of the absence of hundreds of thousands of male workers. Boys between 15 and 18 years of age (but in many cases even younger) were instead sent to areas behind the war front and on the battlefields in order to swell the ranks of the engineering corps of the army for the construction of military structures.
Changes took place not only in the tasks and habits of women and youths but also in those of children. Like everybody else, they too had to get used to the concepts of the Motherland, war and sacrifice. As a result the curriculum in elementary schools was changed radically and attention was focused on topics that were closely linked to what was happening on the border between Italy and Austria. Even children's newspapers, advertisements and toys abandoned their classic childhood themes and embraced the causes of intervention and of the Italian war.
There was also a change that influenced one of the most flourishing industries in Italy in the early years of the 20th century: the cinema. From historical blockbusters such as Quo Vadis? (1912), Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913) and Cabiria (1914), there was a movement in favour of films with a clear patriotic message to support the Italian war.
