It was for "La Tribuna" that Ojetti provided his first regular journalistic contributions, notably from Egypt where he undertook a lengthy reporting assignment to the Luxor excavations.
In 1896 Ojetti progressed matters by organising a conference at Venice under the arresting title, “L'avvenire della letteratura in Italia” ("The Future of Literature in Italy").
Between 1896 and 1899 he was writing for Il Marzocco, a new weekly magazine produced in Italy’s former capital, Florence and covering literature and the arts, but also developments in sociology and politics.
His contributions were also appearing in “Il Giornale di Roma”, the literary-political Sunday paper “Fanfulla della Domenica” and La Stampa, a daily newspaper produced in Turin, another of the country’s former capitals.
[6] Between 1904 and 1909 he worked with the weekly illustrated news magazine L'Illustrazione Italiana, taking on a regular column identified by the title “Accanto alla vita” (‘’loosely, “Alongside life”’’).
A prominent figure in the city, Ojetti quickly became part of the Florentine intellectual elite, which for reasons of history and habit, was in some ways more internationalist and liberal in outlook than equivalent social networks in Rome or Milan.
Nevertheless, for many of those impatient for Italy to win its share of the glory there was much to be celebrated in finding Italians fighting once more against the old northern enemy, Austria, which still featured prominently in popular consciousness as the former colonial power.
Although the extent of the exercise and of Ojetti’s responsibility over it is not entirely clear, it does appear that annihilation of Venice’s rich artistic heritage by Austrian air raids was avoided.
350,000 copies were printed on a colourful two sided sheet against a tricolour backdrop of the Italian flag, and they were “distributed”, in the space of five minutes during the morning of 9 August 1918 from the skies over Vienna, by a squadron of nine planes commanded from his own cockpit by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
In addition to continuing with his work for Corriere della Sera he now also founded his own publication, “Dedalo”, an ambitiously conceived monthly magazine of arts reviews and criticism published by the wealthy artist-publisher Emilio Bestetti who entrusted editorial management and day-to-day directorial responsibilities for the journal to Ojetti.
“Dedalo”, found a ready supply of enthusiastic contributors from among Italy’s leading young artists and intellectuals of the time: these included commentators like Matteo Marangoni from Florence, the Senese Bianchi Bandinelli and Piero Jahier, along with art historian-scholars such as Bernard Berenson and Pietro Toesca.
The number and diversity of the distinguished contributors reflected Ojetti’s underlying conviction that the value of art is enhanced by the way in which it offers visible testimony to history and of civilization more effectively than any other body of sources.
“Pègaso” tended, from the outset, to concentrate on modern and contemporary literature, though there was a consistent rejection of the experimental and avant-garde, which appears to have reflected Ojetti’s own preferences, though it was also conveniently closely aligned to what could already be gleaned of the literary instincts of Italy’s rulers.
Most importantly, during a decade in which government was becoming increasingly hands-on in respect of the media, it followed fascist precepts in ways which, for later post-fascist commentators, risk being interpreted as parody.
His rejection of the idealistic liberalism characteristic of nineteenth century risorgimento and his endorsement of the fascist vision of “Humanitas” were, for instance, on full display in a feature he contributed to the January 1934 edition under the heading “Avvertenza al lettore” (‘’”Warning to the reader”’’).
After July 1943 a new literary class emerged comprising returned exiles from fascism and including, among its younger members, former partisan fighters against the Mussolini government and the German armies in Italy.
In the immediate aftermath of the Mussolini years and the unpopular concurrent war with which they had come to be identified, Ojetti was representative of a period from which newly mainstream intellectuals were keen to move on.
In 1925 Ojetti was one of those who added his signature to Giovanni Gentile’s so-called Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, indicating a wish to remain a member of Italy’s literary establishment under the new regime.
[6][27][28] Between 1925 and 1933 Ojetti served as a member of the Executive Board for the newly inaugurated Enciclopedia Italiana, of which the initial tranche of volumes was published progressively between 1929 and 1936, taking a vital role till 1929 as coordinator of the compendium’s arts section.
[8][29] Through this period he was, in addition, organising numerous art exhibitions as well as injecting his own magic into various publishing initiatives such as, notably, the series “Le più belle pagine degli scrittori italiani scelte da scrittori viventi” (‘’loosely, “The finest pages from Italian writers, selected by living writers”’’), published by Treves, and the Classici Rizzoli series of “Italian classics”.
He was accused of having joined the ‘Repubblica di Salò’, but those accusers forget – or choose to forget – that in 1943 Ojetti was a poor old man afflicted by Alzheimer’s, trapped in his wheel chair, and completely under the control of an overbearing and very fascist wife who [according to subsequent disclosures from researchers and family members] had subsequently gone through Ojetti’s personal notebooks and carefully purged everything that amounted to even the slightest hint of criticism in respect of the Mussolini régime”.
[35]After the liberation of Rome in June 1944 Ojetti was excluded from the “Ordine dei giornalisti”, though it appears that by this time he had not been able to work as a journalist, even for the Corriere della Sera, for at least a year.