Abstract

The author examines nine diaries written during the Italian Liberation in the Second World War. Some of them were written during the narrated events, others afterwards: the former imply a discontinuous method of writing, the latter a continuous one. The different temporal perspectives employed in the diaries are thus analysed through the examination of verb tenses and their stylistic meanings: first the past tense, then the deictic present and the narrative or historical present which is analysed in relation to the verb semantics, the temporal and spatial diesis and the narrative space.