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In 1866 Vittorio Emanuele set a precedent which has been followed in Italy: as Prussia and Austria went to war, he picked Austria as the loser and attacked from the south. He was soundly trounced at Custozza, but he got Venetia in the peace settlement. When France was prostrate in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 he annexed the Papal State, which Napoleon had protected. The peninsula was at last united. Proclaimed Vittorio Emanuele: "It only remains to make our country great and happy."
To be great Italy must have an army, a navy and colonies. But the people who had fought so valiantly for freedom did not care to fight for strange lands; they could not love the African desert as they loved Lombardy and Tuscany. As poor, backward Italy staggered under the weight of military expenditures, her people went off, not to carve out an empire, but to labor in the Western Hemisphere to make enough money to return to Italy to die. Yet the imperial dream persisted.
It persisted even though France grabbed Tunisia from under Italy's nose in 1881, even though the Ethiopians massacred an Italian Army at Aduwa in 1896. By purchase and painful conquest Italy mastered an area in Africa about twice the size of Pennsylvania, called it Eritrea. In 1911 Italy declared an unprovoked war against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, got Tripoli in the settlement and kept Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands provisionally.
No Victories. The imperial dream kept Italy on the fence for nine months of World War I, while crafty Premier Antonio Salandra bargained with both sides.
On April 15, 1915 Italy presented to the Central Powers her conditions for entering the war on their side. All but one of the conditions were rejected, and Italy signed the Treaty of London on April 26, declared war on Austria May 24. World War I gave Italy another great defeat to place beside Custozza and Aduwa: Caporetto.
The Treaty of London, if it had been kept, would have given Italy part of Dalmatia, hegemony over Albania, colonial expansion in Africa and influence in the Near East. Instead, she got only slivers of African territory from the Allies, had to buy, then steal Albania, and waited for May 1941 to get her share of Dalmatia.
It is necessary to have the courage to say that Italy cannot remain forever shut up in one sea, even if that sea be the Adriatic. . . . There are other seas that may interest us. . . . Treaties are transactions which represent agreements, points of equilibrium. No treaty is eternal.—so said Mussolini, dreaming of expansion in 1923. Benito Mussolini was a man in whom the imperial dream was an obsession. Italy would grow strong through Fascism, then Italy would conquer an empire. Not only bits of Africa would be hers; she would rule Mare Nostrum and its shores. Italian ships would ply back & forth between Italy and Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco; to the east they would sail to the gates of Islam, which would recognize Italy as its protector. Italian settlers would occupy all the fertile shores of Mare Nostrum, and Mare Nostrum would be Italian forever.