Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia enters the narrative as both a neighbor with whom Italy must settle the Adriatic question and a state whose changing relationship with Italy exposes the gap between nationalist ambitions and political compromise. The Rapallo Treaty left Fiume independent in 1920, helped provoke a confrontation between Benito Mussolini and the Fiume loyalists of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and made Yugoslavia the destination for an illicit arms scheme. In 1924, a new accord granting Fiume to Italy brought the dispute to a diplomatic close, replacing the poetic and insurrectionary claims associated with D’Annunzio with a settlement credited to Mussolini.

The Adriatic settlement

The Rapallo Treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia was announced unexpectedly on November 12, 1920. Its terms shifted Italy’s eastern border to Monte Nevoso, leaving Trieste secure, but Italy relinquished Dalmatia. Zadar alone was assigned to Italy, without the inland territory or nearby islands that might have connected it to the surrounding region. The book describes it as an Italian rock in a Croatian sea: possession without the broader territorial reach that Italian nationalists had sought.

Fiume received full independence, while Sussak, its eastern coastal suburb and the site of Port Baross, went to Croatia. That arrangement left Fiume neither Italian nor Croatian and, more consequentially for the city’s economy, cut it off from maritime trade with the East. The settlement therefore drew new political boundaries while also imposing a practical constraint on Fiume. Its status and its access to commerce became inseparable from the wider Adriatic dispute.

A treaty that divides the Fascists

Benito Mussolini publicly supported the compromise. In Il Popolo d’Italia, he called himself “frankly satisfied” and described the agreement as the best of the proposals previously advanced. He made a distinction over Fiume and complained that the question of Dalmatia might only be deferred, arguing that peoples’ rights did not lapse; nevertheless, he approved Giovanni Giolitti’s settlement. For the Fiume loyalists, that approval turned a diplomatic decision into an apparent betrayal by a newspaper and political movement they had regarded as allies.

In Fiume, even card-holding Fascists joined a bonfire in Piazza Dante, burning copies of Il Popolo d’Italia that contained Mussolini’s article. A bitter telegram went to the newspaper, and the word “betrayal” circulated openly. The breach then surfaced at the November 15 meeting of the Central Committee of the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan. Mussolini argued that the agreement should be accepted as a fait accompli in the name of national discipline: the country was tired, he said, and the Socialists might exploit a crisis. He regarded D’Annunzio’s initiative as spectacular but gangrenous, something that had to be cut away.

The response showed how directly the treaty had unsettled Italian nationalist politics. Pietro Marsich attacked the agreement and insisted that the Fiume movement was not over; a delegation of Dalmatians, standing against the wall, gave the dispute a human and territorial weight that abstract appeals to discipline could not dispel. Their presence made clear that the treaty’s consequences were not confined to Fiume: the loss of Dalmatia and the fate of its Italian population were also at issue.

Fiume, Yugoslavia, and the threat of insurrection

The treaty’s opponents tested whether its rejection could be made more than a protest. On December 1, 1920, Giovanni Giolitti ordered two armored battleships, eight torpedo destroyers, and two tugs to deploy outside Fiume’s port; the siege had begun, and the city was under fire. Gabriele D’Annunzio sent Alceste De Ambris to make a final attempt to win Fascist support for the Fiume legionnaires. De Ambris proposed an insurrectionary route that would carry forces from Fiume to Zadar, onward to Ancona, and then toward Rome. He pointed to naval vessels available in Fiume and to possible support among Fascists in the Marches and Captain Giulietti’s seamen.

The proposal revealed the strategic geography created by the settlement: Zadar, assigned to Italy, could serve as a waystation, while Ancona offered a landing point on the Italian coast. Mussolini rejected the prospect of rebellion, warning that the Italian public had accepted the agreement with relief and raising the danger posed by Socialists in northern Italy and Bologna. The plan remained De Ambris’s proposal, not an accomplished march. In the episode, Yugoslavia’s importance lies in how the new borders shaped the proposed route and in how sharply those borders divided advocates of diplomacy from advocates of revolt.

An enemy country and the arms traffic

Yugoslavia reappears in a different register in the account of Amerigo Dùmini’s dealings in military surpluses. After securing an option on an enormous consignment—35,000 Mauser rifles, 630,000 Mannlicher rifles, and 20 million cartridges—Dùmini tried Greece, where the cargo ship was turned away from Piraeus. He then made visits to Belgrade and other parts of war-scarred Europe. Because Yugoslavia remained an enemy country in the continuing dispute over Fiume, selling arms there risked violating the prohibition on arming an enemy. Dùmini tried to evade that restriction by using a fictitious company based in Marseilles.

The scheme collapsed after Francesco Giunta, leading a rival profiteering group, denounced the traffic in arms with an enemy country in his newspaper and informed Mussolini. Yugoslav authorities stopped Dùmini in Pola. When he reached Trieste, he was arrested on the orders of Emilio De Bono, who belonged to Giunta’s circle. Dùmini spent the August holiday imprisoned in the Coroneo. From there he telegraphed Cesare Rossi, Michele Bianchi, and Arturo Fasciolo, threatening not to serve as a shield for them. The episode connects Yugoslavia’s diplomatic status to an underground economy in surplus weapons, while showing how the Fiume dispute continued to shape political and personal risks after the treaty itself.

The 1924 accord

On January 27, 1924, Benito Mussolini signed an accord with Yugoslavia granting Fiume to Italy. The book presents the agreement as healing a wound that had been bleeding since 1919 and as a diplomatic achievement rather than the kind of fanciful exploit associated with D’Annunzio. The next evening, Mussolini appeared before the Fascist leadership in Palazzo Venezia, able to claim that the Adriatic question that had sustained years of conflict was now settled.

King Alexander of Yugoslavia praised the agreement from Belgrade, crediting Mussolini’s brilliance and strength with achieving a difficult undertaking. The commendation marked a sharp reversal in the relationship traced across these episodes: in 1920, the settlement with Yugoslavia had left Fiume independent and triggered accusations of betrayal; by 1924, an accord with the same state transferred Fiume to Italy and furnished Mussolini with a diplomatic success. Yugoslavia thus functions not simply as the other party to a border dispute, but as the recurring counterpart through which the narrative measures the changing political value of compromise.