The Adriatic Sea gives the postwar conflict over Italy’s borders a visible geography, but in the book it is also a measure of competing political horizons. The Rapallo Treaty leaves Italy with Zadar but not Dalmatia, and makes Fiume independent rather than Italian. For Gabriele D’Annunzio’s followers, this settlement is a betrayal; for Benito Mussolini, accepting it helps free the Fascist movement to turn its attention toward the struggle on the Italian mainland.

A Sea Reordered by the Rapallo Treaty

The settlement, announced unexpectedly on November 12, 1920, redraws the region in uneven strokes. Italy’s eastern border is shifted to Monte Nevoso, leaving Trieste safe, while Dalmatia is relinquished. Zadar alone is assigned to Italy, without its surrounding inland area or the adjacent islands. The result, as the narrative puts it, is an Italian rock in a Croatian sea: possession without the territory that would make it a secure mainland foothold.

Fiume receives full independence, but Sussak, the eastern coastal suburb that includes Port Baross, goes to Croatia. The distinction has material consequences as well as symbolic force. Fiume is cut off from maritime trade with the East, and the city that D’Annunzio’s rhetoric had made both a martyr and a promise is neither Italian nor Croatian under the new arrangement. The Adriatic is therefore not simply a line between states. Its ports, islands, access routes, and coasts determine what political claims can mean in practice.

Fiume and the Charge of Betrayal

The news strikes D’Annunzio’s project with the force of a public reversal. The narrative calls it an explosion against his dreams, then shows the response at close range: even members of the Fascist movement in Fiume join a bonfire in Piazza Dante, burning copies of Il Popolo d’Italia that carry Mussolini’s article. They send the newspaper a bitter telegram, and accusations of betrayal become openly audible.

Mussolini’s public response makes the rupture sharper. Writing in Il Popolo d’Italia on the day the treaty is announced, he declares himself “frankly satisfied” and judges the compromise the best of the proposals previously considered. He distinguishes Fiume from the question of Dalmatia, where he leaves open the possibility of revision and invokes the enduring rights of peoples. Yet his overall approval of Giovanni Giolitti’s settlement puts him at odds with the Fiume Fascists. The sea that had served as a rallying focus now divides those who want to press the Adriatic claim from those prepared to accept a diplomatic limit.

From the Adriatic to the Mainland Front

In the following day’s newspaper, Mussolini turns from the Adriatic toward the Mediterranean, arguing that Italian possibilities for expansion are not confined to a modest gulf. The shift is at once geographical and political. The narrative presents him as looking beyond the immediate dispute, willing to let D’Annunzio remain fixed on the Adriatic while he makes room for a wider alliance against socialism.

That new orientation is stated in concrete terms: the front he considers decisive runs through the Po Valley, from Milan to Cremona, Bologna, and Ferrara, rather than along the border at Monte Nevoso. Socialists who had triumphed at the polls, the account says, are beginning to suffer defeats in the piazzas and to retreat. Mussolini’s proposed answer is to open Fascist ranks to reactionary forces and to the bourgeoisie, pursuing an enlarged political front at home rather than a confrontation over Fiume. Through prefect Lusignoli, he signals to Giolitti that Milan’s Fascists will not intervene if the government represses the Fiume legionnaires. The Adriatic question thus becomes a test of where Mussolini will commit his movement’s strength—and where he will refuse to spend it.

A Sea Reduced to Two Rocks

At the Central Committee meeting on November 15, the dispute takes the form of a division around a table. Cesare Rossi, Massimo Rocca, and Umberto Pasella stand on Mussolini’s side; Cesare De Vecchi, Pietro Marsich, and other supporters of Fiume occupy the opposing side. Dalmatians stand against the wall like a chorus, their presence recalling the territory the treaty has left outside Italy. Mussolini argues for accepting the settlement as a fait accompli and maintaining national discipline, even while acknowledging that it is unsatisfactory on Dalmatia. His warning is that the country is tired and that political crisis could give the socialists an opening.

The narrative describes Mussolini’s strategic posture through his supposed long sight: he can see the larger political field, but not—or chooses not to dwell on—the smaller details that matter intensely to those losing ground on the Adriatic. The image sharpens the disagreement. To Fiume’s supporters, the coast, islands, and port are not trifles; they are the substance of the cause. To Mussolini, becoming a player in the national political contest requires looking past them. The sea remains central precisely as the object he is prepared to subordinate.

The Adriatic as Route and Limit

The later appeal from D’Annunzio’s representative, Alceste De Ambris, shows that the Adriatic could still be imagined as a route for action rather than merely a boundary. After Giolitti orders naval forces into position before Fiume on December 1, De Ambris presses Mussolini to defend the legionnaires. He proposes an insurrectionary plan that would use ships already in or near Fiume, travel by way of Zadar, and land troops at Ancona before connecting with Fascists in the Marches. Among the vessels he names are the cruiser Mirabello, the destroyers Abba, Bronzetti, and Nullo, and a manned MAS flotilla.

Mussolini rejects the proposal by turning attention back to the political dangers at home: northern Italian socialists and Bologna, already marked by the massacre at Palazzo d’Accursio. De Ambris’s route depends on connecting the Adriatic operation to allies and a wider uprising; Mussolini sees the mainland conflict as the overriding obstacle. In these scenes the sea is at once a strategic passage, the setting of a failed territorial claim, and a scale against which political priorities are measured. Its importance does not disappear when Mussolini looks away from it. Instead, the choice to look elsewhere becomes the decisive fact.