Chapter 1: How did Italy enter the First World War alongside the Allies?
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Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026. Our vigil is ended. Our exultation begins. The border has been crossed. The cannon roars. The earth smokes. The Adriatic is as grey at this hour as the torpedo boat that cuts across it. Companions! Can it be true? We are fighting with arms. We are waging our war. The blood is spurting from the veins of Italy.
We are the last to join this struggle, and already the first are meeting with glory. The slaughter begins. The destruction begins. One of our people has died at sea, another on land.
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Chapter 2: What were Italy's motivations for invading the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood. and their blood begins to flow. We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed. So that was the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio with a frankly lunatic peroration. And he's addressing admirers at dawn on the 26th of May, 1915.
And he's absolutely ecstatic at the news that Italy's soldiers have just fired their first shots and taken their first casualties after joining the First World War. And you would think that by... May 1915, he would have worked out that joining the First World War maybe isn't a brilliant idea, but not a bit of it. He is all over it.
And to quote Mark Thompson in his brilliant book, The White War, on Italy's role in the First World War, has any artist played a more baleful part in decisions that led to violence and suffering on the larger scale? So Dominic, are you a fan of D'Annunzio?
I absolutely despise Danzio, to be honest with you. I think he's one of the worst people we've ever done on The Rest Is History. And his lunatic rhetoric, as you correctly described it, will have terrible consequences for hundreds of thousands of young Italians.
But I'll tell you someone who likes it. Yeah, go on. Is Benito Mussolini, an Italian journalist who may go on to better things in due course?
Higher things, exactly. Yes. And actually, we will be talking about Donunzio and Benito Mussolini, who learns a lot from Donunzio later in this episode. But let's just explain what today's episode is all about. So we're in the middle of this great series, epic series about the year 1915.
And this is the story of one of the bloodiest, the cruelest, the most savage of all the campaigns of the First World War. And this is the attempt by the Italians to invade the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to carve out a little empire for themselves on the Adriatic. And it was fought in conditions that were unlike anywhere else in the war.
So it's these sort of jagged limestone peaks and these sort of deep river valleys in what is now Slovenia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it's also, I think, the most obviously acquisitive of the First World War's campaigns. Yeah, I mean...
It's completely cynical, isn't it?
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Chapter 3: Why was the Italian campaign one of the bloodiest of the war?
They think the principle is on their side, that their native land is encircled by enemies. I mean, it could be the French, it could be the Germans, it could be the Austrians, whoever. And that they are fighting in defence of hearth and home. The Italians are absolutely open about the fact. They're not defending themselves at all. They're trying to attack other people.
And they're fighting for conquest and for glory and for a greater Italy. And the ironic result, the blackly ironic result, is one of the greatest disasters in Italian history.
So it ends with a million Italians dead, a million wounded, and a national sense, even though they do get some territory, there's this national sense of betrayal and resentment that plays an enormous part in the rise of fascism in the 1920s. So it's an extraordinary story. It's probably not as well known in the English speaking world as some other aspects of the First World War.
But you mentioned Mark Thompson's book, The White War.
Yeah, it's an amazing book, isn't it?
It's a wonderful book.
I mean, I've got to be honest, it's the only book on the topic I've read, but I felt having read it, I didn't need to read anymore.
I think that's fair because there's not that many books on this in English. So let's start with Italy. I mean, as you said, Italy was not in the First World War at the beginning. It could have stayed out, and it chose not to. So why on earth has it made this decision? Yeah, there's a meat grinder. Let's jump into it. Exactly. Italy in 1915 is the sixth most populous state in Europe.
It's got 35 million people. So if you think of the big guns, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, and so on. Italy is the sixth. What Italy has in common with Germany is that it's a new country. And you might say, if you were being very cynical, and our Italian listeners, if any exist, will at this point turn the podcast off, you might say Italy is an invented country.
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Chapter 4: What role did Gabriele D'Annunzio play in Italy's war efforts?
Well, I think that is harsh. Do you think that's harsh? Yeah. Yeah. There are some historians who genuinely would argue that.
I know, but I mean, the notion of Italy goes back to the Roman period. Of course it does. And so that is something that obviously is lurking in the minds of lots of enthusiasts for a greater Italy, I think.
So Italy didn't exist until the 1850s, 1860s. There's a process of unification called the Risorgimento, which is led by the kingdom of Piedmont, which was based in Turin and ruled by the royal house of Savoy. And basically by force, by diplomacy, by sort of popular nationalist feeling, the House of Savoy managed to weld together a series of territories that by this point are quite distinct.
They're sort of economically distinct. They speak very different dialects and they weld them together to create a new kingdom of Italy. So that what you have in the late 19th century is a process of basically inventing what it is to be an Italian. What do we have in common? What's Italian culture going to be? What dialect are we going to speak? And so on and so forth.
What national dishes are we going to invent? Right. We did a whole episode on this with friend of the show, John Dickey. about the creation of Italian identity through food. Now, one very good way of welding together a new national identity is to have a common enemy and to have a sense of unfinished business, a sense of kind of victimhood or whatever.
And in its case, this comes down to its northern frontier. And when nationalists look at the map of the newly unified Italy, they say it's in the wrong place. So one nationalist says the frontier is a metal wire planted haphazardly where nothing ends or begins, an arbitrary division, an amputation alien to nature, law and logic.
And Dominic, what sharpens that sense is the fact that on the other side of that border is Austria.
Yeah.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire. And that is the former imperial mistress of Venice and other regions of Italy.
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Chapter 5: How did Italian public opinion influence the decision to go to war?
Exactly. The ancestral enemy, the Austrians. And what also sharpens it is that on the other side of that border, there are some people who speak Italian. So people look at the border and they say, well, what we'd like is I'd like to get the South Tyrol. I mean, there are a lot of German speakers in the South Tyrol as well. They say, well, that's never mind. We can have them in Italy.
We'd like the cities of Trieste and Gorizia. Ideally, I think we'd like to have Slovenia. And I think a lot of modern Croatia really should be part of Italy. So they want- Maybe Gaul, maybe Britannia. They say, we'd like the peninsula of Istria and we would like the coast of Dalmatia. So there are Italian speakers in all of these areas that belong to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And the national slogan is unredeemed Italy, Italia irredenta. And it's from that expression that we get irredentism. So this idea that there is unfinished national business, that we need to complete the nation. And this is an idea that's politically very effective in the late 19th century.
It allows politicians to appeal across this newly united country to different classes, to workers in their cities, to farmers, to urban intellectuals, all of this kind of thing.
And as you said, there is a parallel in Germany.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Now, rather like the Germans, the Italians feel they've united a little bit too late. They've been shut out of the scramble for foreign colonies, for example, in Africa. And if they want to be a great power, they need colonies. So they look to North Africa initially. Obviously, this is Tom Horan bingo. The example of the Roman Empire is hanging over them the whole time.
They want to basically rebuild the Roman Empire as much as possible. They look to North Africa, but their horror... A much bigger power has already got stuck in in North Africa, and that's France.
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Chapter 6: What were the conditions like for Italian soldiers during the campaign?
And actually, the French make it pretty obvious they don't want the Italians getting involved. And there's a bit of rivalry between the French and the Italians in North Africa. And as a result of that, the Italians sign a very implausible alliance in 1882. First of all, well, with Germany, that's not so implausible. But Austria. But with Austria as well. That's mad.
And this is basically to give them a bit more of a free hand in Africa so that the French won't attack them. And it's called the Triple Alliance. A lot of nationalists are very uneasy about it. What are we getting into bed with the Austrians for? They're our enemies. However, the upside, this allows Italy to pursue some colonial adventures.
So in Eritrea, in Somaliland, in Abyssinia, Ethiopia, and most obviously in Libya. And these go generally very badly. I mean, the Italians do make inroads, but their army consistently performs very badly here. So in Abyssinia, 6,000 Italian soldiers were massacred in a single day at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.
And there's still a sense when you get into the 20th century that nationalist ambitions have not been sated, that Italy still needs to prove its virility on the world stage.
Yeah, because in Rome at this point, they're building an enormous monument on the Capitol, which is the great sacred hill of Rome. This is a monument to Victor Emmanuel II, who'd been the king when Italy had been united. Anyone who's been to Rome will immediately be able to picture it. It looks like something out of a Cecil B. DeMille film about ancient Rome.
It's symbolically illustrating the fusion between the unity of Italy And this kind of glorious Roman past, which it is assumed a united Italy will be able to resurrect. Exactly. And that's not completed, I think, until 1911. So just before the outbreak of the war.
It's a monstrosity, actually, isn't it? It's a wedding cake. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What were the outcomes of the battles fought along the Isonzo River?
I think, yes, I think absolutely right that the sense of becoming a great power and building a united nation, that those two things are interfused. And there's this sort of sense of unfinished business, this sense of pressure. and of slight disappointment almost, hanging over the Italian project as you enter the 20th century. Now, at this point, Italy is changing a lot.
It's industrializing, it's building railways and schools. It is, however, a long way behind the other so-called great powers. It's only got a very small urban middle class. The vast majority of Italians work on the land as peasants. Literacy rates are very low. Infant mortality is very high. The state, most people only have a very vague sense of what the state is.
Their horizons are bounded by the locality, by the village, by the farm, all of this. And only a tiny fraction of the population gets to vote. So in 1913, 8 million people out of 35 million people. Politics is a sort of endless, as always in Italy, an endless sort of dance of coalition building. Politicians who are constantly kind of ditching their principles to meet the demands of the moment.
And at the top is the king, Victor Emmanuel III. So he's the grandson of the monument guy. He is. And he is a very short man. He's very short. He's very insecure. He's a coin collector. So he's like you, Tom. Collects coins. He fancies himself as an amateur photographer. That's his passion. He has loads of power under the Italian constitution. So he can call parliament, dismiss parliament.
He can appoint the ministers.
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Chapter 8: How did the aftermath of the war affect Italy's national sentiment?
He directs foreign policy. He commands the army. He declares war. But he doesn't like using his power. In fact, he wants politicians to do it for him. And this, in the long run, will get him into trouble because he'll basically turn himself into Benito Mussolini's puppet in the 1920s and 1930s. But at this point, let's go to 1914 when the First World War begins.
At this point, his prime minister is a man called Antonio Salandra. And Salandra is a conservative lawyer from a rich family, landowning family in Puglia in the south of Italy. But he's backed by the big business elites in the industrial north because he's a conservative. He's a sort of balding man with this absolutely gigantic moustache, exactly as you would want.
Oh, thank God. It's so good to have an enormous moustache back on the rest of history.
It is, of course.
Haven't had one for a while.
He's a very ruthless and devious man. And he is the man who is basically going to act as the head of the conspiracy to drag Italy into the war against the wishes of its people. Now, when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914, Italy was going through all kinds of internal ructions, massive strikes, unrest, talk of socialist and anarchist revolution and whatnot.
So, Salandra was distracted. But his foreign minister, who was the Marquess of San Giuliano, who was a Sicilian aristocrat, said to the Austrians, I know we're in this alliance with you, but if you attack Serbia, we will not support you. And the reason we don't want to support you, well, basically, the Italians don't want to see Austria expand in the Balkans. Become more powerful.
I mean, that would be mad. No, they don't. And they say, we might accept you attacking Serbia if you gave us the South Tyrol. And the Germans actually said to the Austrians, would you think about it? And the Austrians said, hold on. We're about to enter a war to defend our empire. We're not going to start giving bits away to our random neighbours.
So the First World War starts and Italy declares itself neutral. Now, under the Triple Alliance, they didn't actually have to join the war because the Triple Alliance was meant to be a defensive pact, not an offensive one. But I guess it's kind of against the spirit, if not the letter. I think the Austrians and the Germans are disappointed. They say, well, this is really poor from the Italians.
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