D uring the First World War, Italy laid the foundations of a strategy to be fully developed in the coming years of political penetration into Central-Eastern Europe, a plan in direct competition with the Entente's allied great powers, France and Great Britain. 1 Like them, the Italian ruling class soon understood, as early as the war years, how cultural initiatives and propaganda were indispensable tools for complementing classic diplomacy in order to execute a policy of great power abroad.

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... y then began to conceive of a scheme of establishing cultural institutions with the task of bolstering the image of Italy abroad, and starting collaborative relationships with the ruling classes of nations which were finally independent of the Habsburg Empire. During the last year of the war, the government's sensitivity around the topic of propaganda changed, with the turning point being the Italian defeat of Caporetto (Kobarid). This essay develops, integrates and updates research undertaken by the author in previous works, among them the book SANTORO, Stefano. L'Italia e l'Europa orientale. Diplomazia culturale e propaganda . Europe in the interwar period, paying particular attention to the case of Czechoslovakia and covering primarily the tools used by Italy to assert its influence among the "heir countries" of the Habsburg Empire. Among these instruments, the article aims to highlight the importance of culture and propaganda, which alongside politics and economics, allowed Italy to compete with the other great powers for hegemony in Central-Eastern Europe. The other nations' strategies will be taken into consideration as well in order to highlight in a comparative way the role that cultural and propaganda institutions played in the policies of the great powers during this important period of reconstruction. A complex of Italian cultural activities and institutions focused on the study of Central and Eastern Europe, which had been established during the First World War and continued to operate in the post-war period at the time of the last liberal governments, was then strengthened by the fascist regime. Fascism made full use of the potential offered by cultural diplomacy to reinforce its positions in Central and Eastern Europe. Mussolini's unrealistic great power ambitions, however, eventually rendered the network of cultural institutions responsible for the study of Eastern Europe useless as they finally collapsed with the fall of his regime.