Valona is presented as an Italian military garrison under threat from Albanian rebels and as one of the places named in demands for Italy to withdraw from its commitments abroad. Its importance in the narrative lies less in a description of the city itself than in what the garrison crisis and the calls to leave it reveal about the weakening authority of the Italian state in 1920.

Military role

At the end of June 1920, an Italian regiment was ordered to reinforce the garrison at Valona, which was threatened by Albanian rebels. The assignment brought the city into a crisis within the army: the regiment mutinied rather than proceed as ordered. The account places this refusal within a broader breakdown in military discipline and morale.

Mutiny and unrest

The regiment’s revolt found support among the working population of the city. The barracks had to be fired upon to force the mutineers out, linking the garrison’s predicament to local unrest rather than presenting it as an isolated dispute between soldiers and command. Valona thus appears as a point where military disobedience and popular opposition converged.

A slogan of withdrawal

In a letter to Gabriele D’Annunzio dated June 30, 1920, Benito Mussolini described the demand to leave Valona alongside calls to withdraw from Tripoli and Dalmatia. He treated these demands as signs of a wider crisis of dissolution and declining resolve. Valona consequently carried a political meaning beyond its immediate garrison: it was one of the commitments from which, in the language of the unrest, Italy was being urged to retreat.

Narrative significance

The narrative does not detail Valona’s later fate or describe the city’s physical setting. Instead, it gives the place significance through two connected references: the mutiny over reinforcement of its threatened garrison and its appearance in a list of withdrawal demands. Together, these make Valona a measure of the strain on Italian military authority and of the conflict over whether Italy could sustain its position abroad.