Albania is presented as one of the few remaining Italian gains from the Great War, but also as a possession the exhausted country is preparing to relinquish. Its place in the narrative is less that of a self-contained setting than of a test of Italy’s capacity to sustain its postwar ambitions: the decision to withdraw becomes part of a wider picture of military disorder, national retreat, and political crisis.

Protectorate and Military Commitment

The Italian government’s abandonment of the protectorate means giving up one of the few conquests left to Italy after a war that had cost six hundred thousand Italian lives. The narrative recalls Italian soldiers in Albania building roads and marching against Serbian troops. It describes their service in a landscape marked by disease and severe hardship, making the withdrawal seem not merely a diplomatic reversal but the abandonment of an undertaking for which lives and effort had already been spent.

Mutiny and Withdrawal

At the end of June, a regiment of Bersaglieri mutinies when ordered to reinforce the Italian military garrison at Valona, which Albanian rebels threaten. The city’s working population supports the soldiers, and the barracks must be fired upon to force them out. The episode exposes a crisis within the army as well as a breakdown in authority: resistance to deployment draws civilian support, while the state answers with force against its own mutinous troops.

The government subsequently decides to abandon the protectorate. Cesare Rossi later swears that Benito Mussolini wept on August 2 when he heard of the withdrawal. The reported reaction gives the retreat a personal as well as political weight, though it remains Rossi’s account rather than an independently established fact in the narrative.

A Symbol of National Disintegration

Benito Mussolini interprets the withdrawal as part of a larger collapse. In his letter to Gabriele D’Annunzio, he lists Albania alongside Tripoli and Dalmatia as places Italy is being urged to leave, and characterizes this impulse as spiritual disintegration and individual cowardice. He argues that peace at any cost will not avert another war but may lead toward one, and frames the crisis as requiring the courage to set the house on fire to save it. Albania thus becomes a concrete instance in an argument that retreat does not necessarily secure peace.

The episode also sharpens the contrast between national decline and the political promise of renewal elsewhere in the book. Italy’s withdrawal from Albania is set against Benito Mussolini’s demand for decisive action, while the army’s mutiny and the government’s retreat make that rhetoric emerge from an unmistakable scene of disorder. Albania matters in this account as both a costly commitment relinquished and a symbol through which postwar weakness is named.