Vittorio Orlando: Italy

Makers of the Modern World: The peace conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath
By Spencer Di Scala

Italy in 1918was in an ambivalent position: at the outbreak of war the country had been part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but had stayed neutral until joining the Allies in 1915 on the promise of territorial rewards. The war was a near-disaster for the Italians, culminating in the collapse of their armies at Caporetto in 1917. It was this crisis that brought Orlando to power,and he did much to restore the situation, but the Italians looked to Versailles to compensate them for the terrible losses they had suffered.

In this book,the clash between Italy’s territorial demands in the Balkans, which had been guaranteed by the Allies in 1915 and earned through her losses in the War, with the new Wilsonian doctrine of open diplomacy and national self-determination is detailed, and it traces the effects the failure of Orlando’s delegation to satisfy their people’s demands which directly to the rise of Fascism and to Mussolini’s policies in the 1930s as he sought to obtain what Italy had been denied at Versailles.

Professor Di Scala is a research professor of history and History Graduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on Italian and European politics and culture, serves on the editorial boards of scholarly journals, and edits book series on Italian and Italian American Studies. He taught at the University of Kentucky and in 1970 began teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In 1983 he was named a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in Rome. His previous book Italy: From Revolution to Republic: 1700 to the Present was chosen as an alternate of the History Book Club and has gone into several editions.