The Balkans occupy a shifting place in the narrative: they are a horizon for Italian expansion, a theatre of diplomatic confrontation, and a region bound up with the afterlife of wartime weapons. Rather than serving as a setting for one continuous episode, they link Mussolini’s public appeal to nationalist action with the less visible traffic in military surpluses. The same geography that promises an outward movement of Italian power also exposes the rival interests and unresolved conflicts shaping that movement.

A Postwar Horizon

The Balkans first appear within a wider crisis of postwar Europe. The return of five million soldiers is imagined as a force pressing against territorial borders, while the political future divides between those who belonged to the old order and those who will shape what follows. This perspective makes borders more than lines on a map: they are where the consequences of mass demobilization and the unsettled future of Europe are expected to converge.

The region also figures in the contrast between Fiume and the settlement negotiated at Versailles. D’Annunzio presents Fiume as a place of youth, renewal, and forward movement, in opposition to a Europe associated with exhausted diplomacy and suspicion. His decision to remain there, despite the wishes of the Fiumani, gives the city a symbolic place in the contest over the postwar order. In this framing, the Adriatic and the Balkans are not remote margins; they are part of the contested political landscape in which nationalist claims seek to turn the aftermath of war into a new beginning.

Mussolini’s Eastern Mediterranean Initiative

That imagined outward movement becomes a government action during the Corfu crisis. After Italian officers serving on an Allied mission were killed near the Greek-Albanian border, Mussolini demanded extensive apologies and reparations from Greece, including 50 million liras. When the Greek government rejected the demands and appealed to the League of Nations, Mussolini sent a naval squadron to occupy Corfu and threatened to begin a landing by bombing the Old Venetian Fortress if Greece did not comply by the ultimatum’s expiration.

The episode placed Italian force in direct conflict with the League of Nations’ statute. Its importance in the narrative lies both in that breach and in the domestic response: the audacity of the action revived enthusiasm for Fascism, while the prospect of expansion was projected beyond Italy toward the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. Forty Italian ships and 7,000 armed troops assembled off Epirus. During the vigil, the country is depicted as waiting together for news transmitted by naval radiograms, while Mussolini remained awake to follow them. The region thus became the setting for a foreign-policy crisis and a spectacle of national anticipation.

Arms, Routes, and Rival Interests

The Balkans also belong to the postwar economy of surplus matériel. The state sold large quantities of firearms, ammunition, vehicles, fuel, clothing, and medical supplies at low prices; traffickers could then resell them at market rates. Although preference at auctions was formally intended for associations of former combatants, wounded people, disabled veterans, and unemployed workers, the most valuable lots were diverted to companies through dummy fronts and fictitious groups. The trade turned the material residue of war into a continuing source of profit.

Amerigo Dùmini pursued a large arms consignment of 35,000 Mauser rifles, 630,000 Mannlicher rifles, and 20 million cartridges. After an attempt to sell in Greece failed, he travelled to Belgrade and sought to move the cargo through a fictitious Marseille company, since Yugoslavia remained an enemy country in the dispute over Fiume and Italian rules prohibited arming the enemy. The plan was exposed by a rival profiteering group; Dùmini was stopped by Yugoslav authorities at Pola and, on reaching Trieste, arrested on the orders of De Bono. The episode shows the Balkans not simply as a destination for expansion, but as a difficult passage through which commercial ambition met diplomatic hostility and competing Fascist interests.

The Region as a Political Image

In a later account of Fascist growth, the movement’s rise is expressed as a transformation from small groups into legions, from a people into a nation and then a state pursuing expansion abroad. The Balkans form part of that outward-facing horizon, while the arms traffic reveals a less triumphant reality: old weapons and old conflicts continue to shape the present. Together, these strands make the region a point where the promise of national renewal confronts the unfinished business of war.