The aim of the conference is to discuss a comparative analysis of military operations and related wartime phenomena in Galicia and present-day northern Italy during the First World War. The discussions will focus on the experience of war in mountainous environments, including the impact of terrain and weather on winter operations, the logistical challenges of supplying troops in high-altitude regions, and trench warfare in mountain landscapes. The conference will also address the fate of civilians behind the front lines, such as refugees, prisoners of war, repression, occupation, and the situation of national and linguistic minorities, as well as the evolution of war memory cultures, encompassing military cemeteries, transformed battlefields, museums, monuments, education, literature, and the First World War as a tourist and heritage framework.

Day I: 05.10.2026 (Monday)

10:00–10:30 – Registration, Opening & Welcome Remarks

• Agnieszka Gloria Kamińska, Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Milan
• Welcome address by local authorities and host institutions

10:30–12:00 – Panel I: Galicians and Italians at War: Stories Across Fronts
Chair: Francesco Frizzera

• 10:30–10:50 Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas (Sapienza University of Rome): Polish Soldiers in Italy 1916–1917
• 10:50–11:10 Quinto Antonelli (Indipendent Scholar, former Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino): “Quando fui sui monti Carpazi". L'esperienza di guerra dei soldati trentini sul fronte orientale [“When I was in the Carpathian Mountains”;. The war experience of Trentino soldiers on the Eastern Front] 
• 11:10–11:30  Piotr Szlanta (University of Warsaw): General Military Governorate in Lublin 1915-1918 - the main principles of the Austro-Hungarian occupation policy
• Discussion

12:00–12:30 – Coffee break

12:30–14:00 – Panel II:  Civilians at War: Refugees, Public Health and Nutrition on the Fronts and Beyond
Chair: Kerstin von Lingen

• 12:30–12:50 Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University): Bodies in Transit: Refugee Camps, Biopolitics, and Civilian Resilience in Eastern Europe at War
• 12:50–13:10 Liana Popa (University of Vienna): (In)voluntary travelers: A gender-sensitive approach to civilians’ experiences of war-related migration in WW1 Romania
• 13:10–13:30 Oksana Nagornaia (Humboldt University in Berlin): Between Warscapes and Imperial Military Medicine: civilian bodies on the Eastern Front in the First World War
• Discussion

14:00–15:30 – Lunch break

15:30–17:00 – Keynote lecture I: Gustavo Corni, Military occupations in comparison: Eastern Front and North-Eastern Italy

19:00 – Conference dinner

Day II: 06.10.2026 (Tuesday)

09:00 – Registration & Morning Coffee

09:30 – 10:30 – Keynote lecture II: Camillo Zadra, Critical Perspectives on the Great War Trench Preservation and Alpine Museums

10:30–12:00 – Panel III: Frontline Space – War and Landscape
Chair: Kamil Ruszała

• 10:30–10:50 Rupert Gietl, Gianluca Fondriest (ArcTeam/Freie Universitaet Bozen): Written in the Landscape: Places, Traces, and Memories of the First World War in the Sexten Dolomites – Emerging Technologies and Innovative Data Systems for WW1 Conflict Heritage Management

·         10:50–11:10 Nicola Fontana (MITAG): Fortificazioni e militarizzazione del territorio. Il caso trentino tra Ottocento e Novecento [Fortifications and the Militarization of the Territory: The Case of South Tyrol Between the 19th and 20th Centuries]

·         11:10–11:30 Stefano Morosini (University of Bergamo), High-Altitude Warfare as Ecological Engineering: Mount Scorluzzo and the Environmental History of the Alpine Front (Stelvio National Park, Italy)

·         Discussion

12:00–12:30 – Coffee break

12:30–14:00 – Panel IV: Memoryscapes and Narratives of Defeat, Trauma and Victory
 Chair: Piotr Szlanta

• 12:30–12:50 Francesco Frizzera (MITAG): Nationalizing the frontier dead: Casteldante Ossuary, memory tourism, and the commemorative landscape of Rovereto
• 12:50–13:10 Sławomir Kułacz (WSB Merito University in Gdańsk, World War One Research Society): The face of mountain warfare: personal narratives from the Carpathians, 1914–1915
• 13:10–13:30 Marco Mondini (University of Padua): Small, Enormous, Useless, Heroic: A Transnational and Cultural Perspective on the Great War in the Alps
• Discussion

14:00–14:15 – Conference remarks and closure

Organisers and Partners:
Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra (MITAG) Rovereto
Polish Academy of Sciences Scientific Centre in Rome
Polish Academy of Sciences Scientific Centre in Vienna
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Institute of History
University of Vienna, Department of Contemporary History, FWF WEAVE Project BIOFORGE “Empire and Environment. Militarized Refugees’ Bodies and Environments in WW1 Eastern Europe”
Under the auspices of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Milan.