Romania and Italy from the Peace of Bucharest to the Eve of the Peace Conference

The Italian government and the Italian people received the news about the separate peace concluded in Bucharest by Romania and the Central powers with great disappointment. Both the government and sonic political organizations were working to Organize a Romanian Legion in Italy, consisting of Austrian-Hungarian prisoners of Romanian nationality and of Romanian citizens self-exiled to Italy. The Legion was organized, but it did not reach the front before the armistice was signed. At the important Congress of Nationalities organized in April 1918 in Rome, the Romanian question was also presented and discussed by some Italian democratic representatives and by sonic Romanians that had chosen to live in Italy, after the start of the war, people such as Sin-lion Mandrescu. Opinions differed considerably when it came to the Legion's organization and to the future Romanian borders. The majority of Italian observers and journalists were inclined to satisfy the major requests of the Romanian nationalists. Nevertheless, the revolutionary situation in Hungary drove sonic to prudence and to a more balanced opinion about the Romanian-Hungarian conflict. The Italian socialists manifested their enthusiasm for the Hungarian Left before and after the proclamation of the Councils Republic. All these topics arc studied in the present essay on the basis Of unpublished archival documents and of the Italian press (with special regard to La Voce dei Popoli, founded and edited by Umberto Zanotti-Bianco).