Marina Cattaruzza has given us an excellent, thorough, and needed synthesis of the history of Italy's eastern border. She covers the period from 1866—when Italy gained Veneto and western Friuli from Austria in the Third Italian War of Independence—and ends with 2006, as historical controversies over the eastern border continued to mark relations with Croatia and Slovenia. In between these periods, Cattaruzza describes the changes in Italy's eastern border in the context of European diplomatic and military history. She does so in a lucid and pointed manner that makes her work accessible to scholars and students of modern European history who may not be specialists of Italy or its eastern neighbors.

Cattaruzza begins her introduction with a discussion of the role of borders in nation-building and their strategic, economic, and imperial significance. In the first and second chapters, she looks at Italian irredentism in the Austrian Empire and how it became crucial to Rome's foreign policy before World War I. The third and fourth chapters show how territorial aspirations motivated Italy's participation in the war, with the eastern border being extended after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. The treatment of these newly acquired lands under Fascism and the occupation of Croatia and Slovenia during World War II are the subjects of the fifth and sixth chapters, and they highlight the interwar repression of the Slovenian and Croatian minorities and the war crimes committed by Italian occupying forces from 1941 to 1943. Cattaruzza's treatment of these highly sensitive issues, as well as of the Italians who were killed or who abandoned their homes in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II, is clear and fair. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on Italy's capitulation in 1943, the loss to Yugoslavia of almost all of the territories that it gained after World War I, and the subsequent Italo-Yugoslav territorial dispute over Trieste and its surrounding area, which was provisionally settled by the London Memorandum of 1954 (and confirmed by the Treaty of Osimo in 1975). The final chapter examines the post-1954 history of Italy's northeastern region, Friuli Venezia Giulia, through the prisms of Italo-Yugoslav relations and the region's economic development, and ends with how the historical controversies relating to the border have affected Italy's ties with independent Croatia and Slovenia, especially as the latter prepared to join the European Union.

This book offers a history not just of Italian nation-building, diplomacy, and imperialism, but also of Italy's relationship with the South Slavs who challenged where its eastern border should lie. Cattaruzza's focus is of course largely on the Italian side, which is underlined by the fact that her sources are mostly Italian, with only a few Croatian or Slovenian ones among them. This does not detract from the quality or usefulness of her work, but it invites consideration of the role that Croatian and Slovenian sources could play in such a synthesis.

Cattaruzza maintains that the history of Italy's eastern border exposes the institutional weakness of the Italian state and its failure to secure great power status in the first half of the twentieth century, and she cites 1954 as the point at which the eastern border ceased to be fundamental in Italian foreign policy and public opinion. But despite the territorial loss that it experienced after 1943, Italy's cultural and economic influence on the eastern Adriatic was not wiped out. During the Cold War, Italy exerted a major influence on Yugoslavia's citizens through its consumer goods and popular culture; Cattaruzza treats them briefly when she mentions the role of Trieste as a shopping destination for Yugoslavs. Italy was also one of Yugoslavia's leading trading partners, and it maintains this position today with Croatia and Slovenia, where it is a leading foreign investor as well. Italy may have been militarily and territorially defeated on its eastern border, but in terms of soft power it has endured.

Cattaruzza's book is especially recommended to those scholars and students of Italian, Croatian, and Slovenian history who are interested in the development of these nation-states and the role played in this process by their common border—for which a new chapter has emerged since 2006, as Croatia's accession to the European Union has been hampered by a border dispute with Slovenia.