Dalmatia is presented as a disputed territory whose postwar fate becomes a test of Italy’s claims to victory and a powerful instrument of political mobilization. The narrative follows it chiefly through treaties, speeches, flags, and projected campaigns rather than through events taking place there. In those appeals, Dalmatia is at once a promised acquisition, a symbol of national humiliation, and part of a larger imagined geography of Italian redemption and rebellion.

The postwar territorial dispute

The dispute is rooted in wartime promises. The 1915 agreement that brought Italy into the war alongside Russia, France, and Great Britain had promised Dalmatia to Italy in the event of victory. Nationalists invoked its long association with the Republic of Venice to present the claim as both a matter of prior possession and a debt owed for Italy’s sacrifice. They joined it rhetorically to a separate claim for Fiume, a city with a large Italian majority that had not been included in the wartime agreement. The compact slogan linking the two territories made them appear parts of one unfinished settlement, although their claims rested on different grounds.

The expectation of acquisition met resistance at the Paris Peace Conference. On April 23, 1919, Woodrow Wilson addressed the Italian people directly in a published letter and rejected claims to both Dalmatia and Fiume. The next day, Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and foreign minister Sidney Sonnino abruptly left the negotiations. The walkout made the territorial disagreement a public crisis: the book presents the refusal not simply as a diplomatic decision but as an affront, sharpened by Italy’s losses in the war and by the sense that its former allies were withholding what had been promised. Dalmatia consequently became one of the names through which disappointment with the peace settlement could be expressed.

A place made into a political symbol

Gabriele D’Annunzio turned the claim into a ritual of mourning and expectation. In Rome on May 6, 1919, he displayed Randaccio’s flag, associated with a dead infantryman, and called for Italian flags to be draped in black until both Fiume and Dalmatia were returned to Italy. The gesture joined a specific territorial demand to the memory of the war dead. In his account, the flag bore the image of all those who had died for their country; mourning was therefore made to stand for a continuing national vow rather than for a completed war.

The speech also transformed an absent place into a scene the crowd could imagine. D’Annunzio asked his listeners to hear the stride of an army in the streets of Istria and Dalmatia. The audience below the monument to Marcus Aurelius began marching in place. Dalmatia was not the physical setting of this Roman assembly, but the imagined march brought it into the square as a destination and a summons. The episode shows how the territory’s political force in the narrative depends on performance: a flag, a call to silence, and an imagined sound give distant claims an immediate public form.

The same symbolic geography appears in Fiume. In October 1919, rumors surrounding D’Annunzio’s rule included plans for a conquest moving east toward Zadar, Dalmatia, and Split, as well as a separate projected march westward through other Italian cities. These remained rumors in the account; it states that the commander had not acted and that the army had not moved as a whole. Their importance lies in the scale of the ambitions attributed to him. Dalmatia figures as a possible extension of the Fiume venture, while Fiume itself becomes the base from which competing projects of territorial expansion and political upheaval are imagined.

From irredentist claim to wider cause

At a rally in Fiume on October 24, D’Annunzio began with the city’s desire to be Italian and described the boundaries claimed for the free nation with detailed attention to regions, villages, islands, and reefs. The speech then widened its horizon: Fiume was recast as a beacon for a larger international cause. This shift did not erase the territorial claim to Dalmatia. Instead, it placed that claim within a rhetoric that joined national aspiration to the liberation of peoples presented as oppressed across the world.

That expansive project took organizational form in the Fiume League, developed by Léon Kochnitzky with D’Annunzio’s support. Its proposed list of peoples and territories included Dalmatia alongside Fiume, Albania, Croatia, and other places described as deprived of liberty. The scale of the list made the League’s international ambition clear, but the narrative also distinguishes this ideal from its limited practical activity. Kochnitzky eventually resigned, concluding that the League had become a vehicle for Balkan intrigue rather than the universal assembly he had imagined. Dalmatia thus occupies two registers at once: it remains part of an Italian territorial program while also being named within a broad, unstable coalition of supposedly oppressed peoples.

The connection to Venice gave the claim another ceremonial form. At the June 15 celebration of San Vito’s day in Fiume, a Venetian delegation presented a plaque bearing the winged Lion of San Marco for the town hall. D’Annunzio linked Fiume’s origins to Venice and named cities of Istria and Dalmatia as part of the occasion’s redemptive geography. The ceremony’s flags, public speeches, and celebration made Venetian memory available as a visual and political language. Dalmatia was invoked as part of a shared Adriatic past, even as the book had already shown that the territory’s future remained unsettled.

A contested claim in later politics

Dalmatia also appears in Benito Mussolini’s response to the upheavals of 1920. In a letter to D’Annunzio on June 30, he described Italy as undergoing a severe crisis and criticized calls to withdraw from places including Dalmatia. His intervention places the territory within a wider argument about retreat, national purpose, and political disorder. The emphasis differs from D’Annunzio’s mourning ritual: Dalmatia remains a measure of whether Italy will persist in its claims, but the appeal now serves as part of Mussolini’s attack on what he portrays as national withdrawal.

Across these episodes, the narrative does not resolve Dalmatia’s status or portray a transfer of control. It shows how the territory is repeatedly made to carry competing expectations: the unfulfilled promise of wartime diplomacy, the grief and vow attached to the dead, the projected reach of D’Annunzio’s Fiume enterprise, and the argument for refusing retreat. Its importance is therefore both territorial and rhetorical. Dalmatia helps turn a disputed postwar settlement into a continuing political drama, in which memory of sacrifice and promises of national renewal sustain a claim whose outcome remains beyond the scenes presented.