In 1915 the young Italian state became embroiled in the great European conflagration of 1914–18. The infant nation's youthful enthusiasm for the conflict stemmed from a bitter revanchism, which gripped her elites with the concept of a Greater Italy. An Italy which would be a suitable successor to the myriad of renaissance states which immortalized the peninsula with sophistication and thassalocratic potency. Yet of all the images of her past, the Italian political class's favourite lay in the ultramarine imperial portrait of the Venetian Republic. The city state's former glories across the Adriatic, the Istrian peninsula and out into the eastern Mediterranean, granted Italy's radically nationalist, educated strata, a picture of a past which existed a mere century ago and could thus be feasibly restored in a not too distant future.