The sense of crisis in Italian society and foreign policy around 1910 did not really imply a break with the past. Historians are often too eager to locate turning points to divide history into a story of one parenthesis after another. So, the more they are studied the more blurred become many of the alleged differences in the foreign policies of Fascist and Liberal Italy. Those who favour historical parentheses often search for historical forerunners, for those who play John the Baptist, who signal the turning point on the horizon. In Liberal Italy, the chief harbingers of fascism-to-come are usually seen as that group of intellectuals and publicists who, at Florence in December 1910, founded the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana.

The Nationalists' first hero was Enrico Corradini. According to Fascist historiography, it was in the dark days of the defeat at Adowa, when a few of the ‘best men’ in Italy felt a new, stubborn stirring of patriotism; then Corradini lit the torch which would guide the way forward. His idea that Italy was a ‘proletarian nation’ would become the catchcry of many a later opponent of Marxist internationalism, and be deliberately used to divert the masses from socialism to nationalism. This romantic picture of a heroic minority rising, a phoenix from the ashes of defeat, and waxing, uncorrupted, before absorption into fascism is, to say the least, distorted. The originality, the unity and the influence of the Nationalists before the First World War have been greatly exaggerated under the impact of events which came later.