Enrique Díaz Retg and El Diluvio: reportage from the Italian frontline (1916)

In the year 1916 Enrique Díaz Retg, a staff journalist working for the Spanish newspaper El Diluvio, extremely popular among Barcelona’s working class readers, was assigned to report from the Italian front. Following an invitation from the Italian Foreign Office, he was granted permission to visit war zones under the control of the Italian army. During this journey, which began on 5 September and concluded in Rome on the 22nd, he traveled with two other famous Spanish reporters, Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Eduardo Gómez de Baquero. Comparing the articles produced by the three journalists allows us to perceive the main distinctive features of Enrique Díaz Retg’s work. From an ideological point of view, his articles reveal a bias in favor of the Latin race and in them he calls for Mediterranean nations to unite, openly inviting the Spanish authorities to enter into war against the barbaric German enemy. In doing so, he contributed to widening the social gap that in the years to come would increasingly alienate the working class from the institution of monarchy and the Catalan elites.