The Treaty of Rome (1924) settled the dispute over Fiume by granting the city to Italy. Signed by Benito Mussolini in January 1924, the agreement resolved a question that had kept the unresolved wounds of the Great War open since 1919. In the book’s account, its importance lies not only in the territorial outcome but also in the contrast between Mussolini’s diplomatic achievement and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s unfinished dream of Fiume.

Background: Fiume and the Postwar Dispute

Fiume had become a defining symbol of the unsettled postwar order. In January 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio described 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations. He set the city’s promise of youth, life, faith, and a future against what he portrayed as a fearful and exhausted Europe. Yet the book also notes that Italians had not followed him in the way he hoped, and that his standing was already waning.

The treaty belongs to a wider period in which political authority was being remade through both institutions and force. By 1921, Benito Mussolini could read the liberals’ acceptance of an alliance with the fascists as evidence that the movement had entered parliamentary politics. At the same time, the government’s attempts to constrain armed fascist groups were frustrated by the party leadership’s insistence that its sections and combat squads formed an inseparable unit. Against this unsettled political background, an agreement on Fiume offered a conspicuous diplomatic resolution to a dispute that had resisted settlement since 1919.

The Agreement and Its Immediate Reception

On January 27, 1924, Benito Mussolini signed an accord with Yugoslavia granting Fiume to Italy. The next evening, at a meeting of fascist leaders in Palazzo Venezia, the agreement was presented as a diplomatic achievement: the dispute was mended by negotiation rather than by the kind of spectacular exploit associated with a poetic nationalist dream. The book identifies this distinction as central to Mussolini’s success. The territorial outcome mattered, but so did the demonstration that he could turn a long-running national claim into an agreement between states.

The accord received public praise from King Alexander of Yugoslavia, who credited Benito Mussolini’s brilliance and strength with making a difficult undertaking possible. That acclaim gave the settlement an international dimension within the narrative: Mussolini was not merely claiming to embody national renewal at home, but was being recognized abroad as the statesman who had resolved a persistent dispute.

Mussolini, D’Annunzio, and Rival Claims to Fiume

The book places the treaty in deliberate contrast with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s continuing attachment to Fiume. Where D’Annunzio had made the city the setting for a passionate vision of national and generational rebirth, Benito Mussolini secured its transfer through diplomacy. The contrast is sharpened by the image of D’Annunzio, still living on the shores of Lake Garda, building what the narrative calls a monumental tomb. The settlement thus becomes a political answer to a rival’s poetic project, and a way of claiming practical command over an issue that had helped define the postwar nationalist imagination.

This contrast also carries an irony. D’Annunzio’s account had placed Fiume among the signs of a new age, but the city’s fate was ultimately settled not by his continued presence there but by an agreement negotiated by Benito Mussolini. The treaty did not erase the symbolic force Fiume had acquired; instead, it shifted who could claim to have brought the dispute to an end.

Political Significance

The treaty was signed as Mussolini’s domestic position was being measured against the coming election. Parliament had been dissolved on January 25, and the April 6 vote was expected to become a plebiscite for or against him. The book emphasizes the contrast that fascism had weakened while Benito Mussolini himself had grown stronger. The agreement with Yugoslavia provided a concrete diplomatic success at this moment, reinforcing the picture of a leader whose authority was increasingly associated with personal achievement.

The Treaty of Rome therefore joins territorial settlement to political image-making without reducing one to the other. It resolved the Fiume dispute in Italy’s favor and, in the narrative, demonstrated a method sharply different from D’Annunzio’s theatrical nationalist enterprise. Its significance rests on that double result: Fiume was granted to Italy, and Mussolini could present the settlement as proof that he—not the poet who had once made the city his cause—could close the postwar wound through state diplomacy.