I documenti diplomatici italiani (ottavo serie

This selection of more than 700 official documents, drawn mainly from the Italian Foreign Ministry archives, and also from the central state and armed forces ministerial archives, addresses Italian foreign policy from January 1939 to the signing of the so-called Pact of Steel, the political and military alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in May 1939. It is volume eleven, and completes a series of twelve volumes, covering Italian Fascist foreign policy from 1935 to the outbreak of war in September 1939 (Vol. XII, with which this volume most immediately connects, was published more than half a century ago, in 1952). The Foreign Ministry documents on the negotiations for the Pact of Steel have been public for some time, and were used in Mario Toscano's meticulous reconstruction of the diplomatic origins of the alliance, The Origins of the Pact of Steel, which appeared in 1967. One should never undervalue the Herculean efforts of the teams of historians and archivists who bring to publication a series of original documents, nor underestimate the bureaucratic frustrations and delays involved in the ordering and re-ordering of archive materials, which presumably lie behind the otherwise incomprehensible chasms of time separating the appearance of related publications. But this volume's publication now inevitably raises the question: so what's new? The editor of the collection, the Italian diplomatic historian, Gianluca Andre, is refreshingly honest about this in his concise introduction: his answer is, not much

Alliance · Archaeology · Bureaucracy · Christian ministry · Foreign policy · German · Ministry of Foreign Affairs · Nazism · Negotiation · Neutrality · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Classics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law