Italian front (World War I)

The Italian front (Italian: Fronte italiano; German: Südwestfront) was one of the main theatres of war of World War I. It involved a series of military engagements along the border between the Kingdom of Italy and Austria-Hungary from 1915 to 1918. The Kingdom of Italy entered the war on the Entente side, although they had previously been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance. They claimed that this alliance was void due to the treaty being defensive and the Germans attacking first. When they joined the war, they were aiming to annex the Italian-speaking provinces of Trento and Trieste (the main objectives of Italian irredentism) and also German-speaking South Tyrol and the largely Slavic regions (where Italian minorities lived) of Istria and northern Dalmatia from their previous ally Austria-Hungary. Those territories were secretly promised to the Italians in the 1915 Treaty of London by Britain, France and Russia. The front soon bogged down into trench warfare, similar to that on the Western Front. Fighting also occurred at high altitudes and with extremely cold winters. The war along the front displaced much of the local population, and several thousand civilians died from malnutrition and illness in Italian and Austro-Hungarian refugee camps.

Military operations came to an end in 1918 with Italian victory and the capture of Trento and Trieste by the Royal Italian Army. Austria-Hungary disintegrated due to military defeats and internal turmoil caused by pacifists and separatists. All military operations on the front came to an end with the entry into force of the armistice of Villa Giusti on 4 November 1918. The treaties of 1919 and 1920 allowed Italy to annex Trento, Trieste, South Tyrol and Istria, while northern Dalmatia was assigned to Yugoslavia, with the exception of the province of Zara. The annexation of Trento and Trieste is seen as the culmination of the Italian unification and, for this reason, the Italian intervention in World War I is also considered the Fourth Italian War of Independence, in a historiographical perspective that identifies in the latter the conclusion of the unification of Italy, whose military actions began during the revolutions of 1848 with the First Italian War of Independence.