"La Catalogna in rivolta". La semana trágica nelle pagine del Corriere della Sera

Abstract

The tragic week (semana trágica) appears in the annals of history as one of the most brutal and impressive events of the twentieth century in Spain. Inhomogeneous, anticlerical and - in some ways - headless, the Catalan rebellion arose from the protest about the recruitment of the reservists appointed to defend Melilla from the Rifian attacks. For this reason, a general strike was called on July 26th1909 which, due to the exacerbation of the souls, soon turned into a week of hard-fought clashes repressed by the Maura’s government. The echo of the violence that characterized those days reached many European cities, with consequent reverberation on the most important newspapers of the time. Among these, the Corriere della Sera is undoubtedly one of those that, on a daily basis, recounted the evolution of the story. In this regard, the present work intends to bring back the most significant contributions, published in the Milanese newspaper, between the end of July and the beginning of August 1909, in an attempt to reconstruct the interpretation of the events as offered to the Italian public opinion.