From his earliest youth Gentile gave expression to a passionate patriotism. As a young man, he lamented the fatherland’s defeat at Adua in 1896—in newly reunited Italy’s first assay into colonial conquest. He early learned to deplore the passivity and the indecisiveness of Italians. It was not long before he sought the making and remaking of Italians as standard-bearers of a newly reunited nation no longer ready to submit to the duplicity of foreigners. He was humiliated by the disdain with which Italy was treated by the more industrialized nations of Europe, and longed for a “Greater Italy”—when the nation, once again, would be an actor on the world scene. ¹