In the years that followed World War I, the Italian-Yugoslav dispute over the possession of the former Habsburg territories along the eastern Adriatic coast was such a controversial and divisive issue that the quarrel with Belgrade dominated and even partly paralyzed domestic political debate in Italy. The so-called “Adriatic Question” arose at the end of the Great War as a consequence of the Austro-Hungarian empire's defeat and fall, and reached its climax during the Paris Peace Conference. At the conference, Italy's claims to the whole of Istria and the central part of Dalmatia were confronted with identical Yugoslav demands for the entire Dalmatian coastal region and for all the Istrian districts. Italy's requests had a twofold purpose: completion of the national unification process, with the annexation of Austrian districts inhabited by Italian populations, and fulfillment of strategic requirements, such as the naval supremacy in the Adriatic. The Yugoslav demands stemmed mainly from an extensive application of the nationality principle, according to which Istria and Dalmatia were to be considered Yugoslav lands due to the presence of Slovenian and Croatian populations. If there was no doubt that the majority of the Dalmatian inhabitants were ethnically Croatian, in Istria the picture was slightly different, as the region was at least half Slovenian and half Italian. Nonetheless, Italy's aspirations were regarded as an expression of expansionist nationalism and an exercise of Realpolitik, while Yugoslav claims were viewed as perfectly in line with Wilsonian idealism based on the principles of self-determination and international democracy.

As a result, at the peace conference, Italy suffered diplomatic isolation and failed to obtain all the territorial acquisitions that had been promised by the Entente powers in the Treaty of London of April 1915 in return for Italy's entry into the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. After all the economic and human losses caused by the war, a sense of frustration and the feeling that it was a partial victory (vittoria mutilata) spread all over the country and poisoned Italian politics. The nationalist propaganda gained increasing political consensus with major destabilizing effects on domestic politics and foreign policy. The ruinous political climate and the inadequacies of Italian leadership led to the decline of the liberal regime and to the rise of fascism. The “Adriatic Question” thus dominated the Italian political agenda, while the liberal experiment was ending and fascist rule was coming to power.

The crucial importance of the “Adriatic Question” in Italian domestic and foreign politics is clearly underlined and well-documented by Marina Cattaruzza's synthesis, which is devoted to the political and diplomatic complexities of the Italian-Yugoslav border dispute after World War I. The book is the fourth volume in a series edited by the Historical Archive of the Italian Senate dedicated to “Historic Debates in Parliament” and is intended to commemorate the centenary of World War I, shedding light on a major controversial issue in the historiographical debate on postwar Italian politics.

In the first part, Cattaruzza examines the troubled evolution of Italy's Adriatic politics and diplomacy from the end of World War I to the Pact of Tirana in 1926, which definitively marked the anti-Yugoslav stance of the fascist regime. The author focuses on the uneasiness of the Italian diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, on the unexpected radicalization of the question relating to the fate of Fiume/Rijeka, and on the political instability produced by the widespread sense of disillusion and anger for the frustrating consequences of the war.

In the second part of the book, Cattaruzza documents the debates on the Adriatic Question, which took place in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate from April 1919 to December 1920 (i.e., from the Paris Peace Conference discussions on the Italian-Yugoslav borders to the approval of Treaty of Rapallo). It is a selection of documents, which include government communications of the major foreign policy decision makers (such as Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Francesco Saverio Nitti, Tommaso Tittoni, and Carlo Sforza) and a number of parliamentary speeches delivered by leading figures in the national debate on the Adriatic question (such as Gaetano Salvemini, Luigi Federzoni, Attilio Hortis, and Salvatore Barzilai). Even if the documentary section covers only a short period of the Adriatic Question, without including the parliamentary discussions in the crucial years from 1922 to 1924, Cattaruzza's work is of great interest in understanding Italian political and diplomatic history in the postwar years.