Abstract
This article focuses on the theme of the Italian intervention in World War I, which was supported by the cultural, political and military elite against the interests and the will of the popular and rural masses, mostly unrelated to the heroic myth of the war. In particular, the study presents the travel diary of Miguel de Unamuno, who in 1917 was invited by the Italian Government to visit the military front. The diary includes various articles, most of which appeared in the newspaper La Nacion of Buenos Aires, and other works published in Spanish and Italian periodicals. Unamuno was portrayed as a fervent supporter of interventionism against the belligerent forces of the German coalition, and he was greeted with sympathy by Italian intellectuals, who were enthusiastic readers of his commentary on Don Quixote, seeing him thus as a modern interpreter of idealism. In the pages of Unamuno, there is overlapping propaganda, heroic mysticism and literary vision, mitigating the painful images of World War I with its contradictions and violence.