The Italian national movement had undergone several development phases, and the unification of Italy in 1866 had given rise to Italian irredentism and the tendency to incorporate the unredeemed lands along the eastern Adriatic coast into the Kingdom of Italy. A major milestone in the development of irredentism was 1882 when Italy signed the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany and stayed its formal member until the outbreak of the First World War. If until the end of the 196 century the irredentist movement was mostly led by the left wing, in particular by the democrats and republicans, at the beginning of the 20th century its reins were taken over by Giovanni Giolitti's policy of "new liberalism", i.e. by the nationalist circles of the new bourgeoisie, the court and the army. The Austrian Littoral and Dalmatia were subject to campaigns launched by the nationalist societies Pro Patria and Lega Nazionale, while Italy was home to the societies Dante Alighieri and Trento e Trieste and saw the publication of numerous gazettes such as L'Eco dell'Alpi Giulie and later on magazines such as II Regno, II Carroccio, La Grande Italia and L'Idea Nazionale. By its first congress in Florence in December 1910, the Italian irredentist movement had become increasingly radical in its claims for strengthening the army and for the incorporation of uredeemed lands. In that period, the unredeemed lands, in particular those of Trent, Trieste and Istria, saw the formation of specific forms of irredentism. Particularly in Trieste, they were practiced by the liberal and national camp gathered round the magazine La Voce, which propagated "cultural irredentism" (Scipio Slataper), on the other. In Trieste the socialist party was also strong. Among its supporters a special mantion must be made of Angelo Vivante, the political editor of the newspaper II Piccolo and later of the news-sheet Lavoratore. In 1912 he wrote a documentary work L'Irredentismo Adriatico, in which he condemned the proposition that the high level of Italian culture and civilisation gave Italians the right to assimilate people from other ethnic groups. Such aspirations posed a great threat to the Trieste liberal and national camp, and so Trieste irrendetism was cheracterized by the anti-Slavic stance on the one hand and by the opposition to international socialism, which after 1890 relied on the Slavic element in the struggle against the Italian nationalist movement, on the other. A strong supporter of anti-Slavic tendencies was Ruggiero (Timeus) Fauro, who propagated the idea of the great Italy and its dominion over the Balkans in the spirit of new, aggressive Italian nationalism. The attainment of this goal implied a conflict with Austria on the one hand and the escalation of the Slovene-Italian national conflict along the entire eastern Adriatic coast on the other. Italy's breaking off of the pact of alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary and her decision to side with the powers of the Entente (1915) were clear signals of her territorial claims on the eastern Adriatic even though nothing was yet known of the Treaty of London, signet secretly in 1915, by which the allies, among other things, had also offered Italy, if she entered the war, the Austrian territories of the Adriatic, consisting of the whole of Istria and most of Dalmatia.
