ABSTRACT
Just a few years after its rise, irredentism began to move away from its original roots in Mazzinian thought and to change the scope of its ambitions, adapting them to the foreign policy of the newly-born nation state. The revival of Cesare Balbo’s theses led people to focus their attention on the compensations that Italy could demand in exchange for an hypothetical Austrian expansion into the Balkan Peninsula, overestimated in its extent if not its likelihood.1 Federico Chabod accurately remarked that irredentism itself ended up by territorializing the national problem, thus abandoning any universalistic aspirations.2
