The First World War began as a clash of contending armies but soon became a conflict that would test to the limit not just the military power but also the state machinery, social cohesion and cultural values of the countries caught up in it. Italy passed that test despite being perhaps the most poorly prepared of the Great Powers to face it. By common agreement the ‘least’ of them, she along with Germany was also the newest, and she was the weakest. The legacy of five decades of unification was not one that best prepared her for the maelstrom into which she plunged in 1915.

The Italian Risorgimento was a national revolution from above. After 1870 the king of Italy headed a parliamentary monarchy lacking both the popular underpinning provided for the French parliament by the traditions of the Republic and the autocratic authority through which the Kaiser and hisministers governed the German Reich. Italian governments stood or fell according to their leaders’ success in making and maintaining majorities that were fundamentally unstable and precarious. The country was run by a narrow political and social oligarchy: on the eve of the world war the sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero concluded that thirty people were governing thirty million people for the benefit of three hundred families. The politicians presided over a predominantly rural peasant society: on the eve of the war over half of the active population worked in agriculture, and in turn half of these were rural day-labourers who were employed on average for only 150 days a year.