Vanda Wilcox’s book is one of the first to clearly explain to an international audience why Italy’s involvement in the First World War cannot be detached from an imperial contextualization. The author argues that Italy’s experience of war should be explored far more comprehensively than historiography has done, too often placing the focus on military operations along the country’s northeastern border. While there is, of course, a logic in centering attention on the Isonzo Front, where Italy invested most of its military and political capital, such a narrow view is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it is politically conditioned, as it legitimizes the nationalist excuse that Italy’s entry into the Great War was motivated only by the desire to liberate the terre irredente. This distorted perspective leads to a second issue: it disregards the fact that Italy (also) waged a war of conquest for territorial gain, aiming to elevate its status to one of the European empires. Since the formation of the Italian state a few decades earlier, its political elite had understandably struggled with feelings of inferiority compared to other European powers. Finally, by signing the Treaty of London in the spring of 1915, renouncing its alliance with the Central Powers and joining the Entente, Italy secured assurances from France, Great Britain, and Russia that it would, at least to some extent, participate alongside them in determining the future of postwar Europe and the world. The Italian Empire and the Great War comprehensively address this issue, placing the Italian experience of war within a broader interpretative framework and continually reflecting on its connections to the shaping of the notion of italianità. Through an absorbing narrative, the book recounts the attacks by Italian soldiers along the Isonzo River, but also their involvement in missions across the Balkans, including Albania and Macedonia, and all the way to China, and then, after the war, in various locations around the eastern Mediterranean. Not only that, it describes how Italians abroad, from the United States to Argentina and Australia, actively and personally contributed to the war effort demanded by their homeland.

This analysis introduces another important contribution of the book. Addressing the topic of race, the author examines the concept of italianità, which emerged and initially lived in scientific and military circles but gradually spread to a broader society through the press and then entered a new phase with the war. Italians had to confront the “Other” in practice when conquering their territories. Although rhetoric sought to frame this relationship within the alleged openness of the Italian temperament, the attitude toward opponents was clearly rooted in racist foundations. The author aptly notes that this racist colonial mentality was not confined to non-European regions and non-White populations but permeated the mental horizon of soldiers fighting on all fronts, particularly against Slavic and Germanic peoples. We are thus reminded that the racist practices of the Fascist era in the Adriatic, South Tyrol, and Libya were not Mussolini’s invention but rather an expression of the long-standing need for the affirmation of italianità (170).

The book clearly illustrates Italy’s ambiguous attitude toward itself and others. While the Italian state greatly benefited from the war, both in terms of territory and other concessions, it adopted the postwar slogan of “mutilated victory” to assume the role of victim, thereby misleading both national and international public opinion. This strategy, however, proved to be a double-edged sword for the country’s leadership, as it allowed Mussolini to point a finger at the incompetence of the ruling class and rise to power. During his regime, Mussolini more assertively implemented the “deep-seated cultural scripts about Italian identity in terms of both nation and state: Italians perceived themselves as a racially superior White nation whose state embodied Risorgimento values of liberty and unity” (242). The multifaceted character of the book underscores the political, military, as well as broader cultural elements of the Italian experience of war.

This widened lens reveals that despite entering the First World War in May 1915—nearly a year after its alleged main protagonists began fighting in the summer of 1914—Italy was not a late comer into combat. If anything, with its attack on Ottoman territories in North Africa in 1911, it can be considered a forerunner of the global conflict. Reintegrating Italy into the history of World War I does more than simply add one country to the broader context of war developments; in fact, the Italian experience shows us that it is possible, even appropriate, to bring the traditional chronology of the war forward. Contemporary studies of the Great War have spread out the scope of analysis from a narrow Western-centric military focus to encompassing the whole Central and Eastern European region, as well as social and cultural topics, allowing war narratives to continue beyond November 1918. By incorporating the war theaters in Poland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Far East, the temporal arc extends into the mid-1920s, which is essential for connecting and understanding events that occurred during and after the war.

While these studies have stretched the chronology into the future, the Italian example teaches us that it should also be expanded into the past. Nationalism did not have to wait for Princip’s shots in Sarajevo to start spreading among the Italian masses. The first chapter of the book is a good illustration of how imperialism and irredentism had long been embedded in Italian politics and society, and how the desire for a place in the sun had spurred the Italian army to invade Tripolitania in September 1911. The attack on a weakened Ottoman Empire in North Africa triggered a chain reaction at the other end of the Mediterranean: with the Ottoman army preoccupied with defending Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the Italians, the Balkan states saw an opportunity to exploit the situation and engaged in a two-year conflict—first, against the High Porte and, subsequently, among themselves in what became known as the Balkan Wars. In short, if we consider the broader Mediterranean region, as Vanda Wilcox does in her work The Italian Empire and the Great War, we not only gain deeper insight into the imperial aspirations of the Italians and into their search for identity but also a better understanding of how intertwined the war scenarios were and how deeply they were influenced by the mental frameworks developed before the war, which laid the foundation for the postwar world to come.