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I think Italy did the only possible thing in a situation that seemed very favourable.

NEUTRAL ARGUMENT: The neutrality was possible actually, see the Netherlands, and maybe it would have resulted in a better economical situation for Italy (being able to treat with both sides) and more political stability. Which in hindsight might have avoided the red years and Mussolini's ascension. There was a huge neutrality front in Italy, but the pro-war one prevailed even though not really in a trasparent way. The Treaty of London was in fact kept secret from the Parliament and known only to members of the Salandra cabinet. There was a fear that staying neutral would have doomed Italy's possibility of annexing the missing territories in case of a German/Austrian victory (and at the first it looked like Germany could get a decisive win on France's border with Von Moltke at the First Battle of the Marne).

PRO-WAR: The nationalism, the Risorgimento's sentiment was not completely gone. The foreign policy was still the same since the unity, so unifying all the Italian territories, and many were still lacking (Trento, Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia, Fiume). And Austria-Hungary wasn't surely giving them away, the only way to get them was joining the Entente or staying militarily neutral and pressing the claims during peace treaties, if France won.

AGAINST WAR: Joining the Central Empires wasn't possible. Italy's navy was nothing against France and UK's, and Italy needed their resources, in fact imported lots of goods from their colonies. And since Austria-Hungary didn't really have a navy, Italy would have put herself in a naval war against UK and France alone. That would have been way worse than Caporetto.

The war resulted in more than a million Italian deaths. The result were just a bunch of territories, not even all the promised ones. Speaking as an Italian, it was surely not worth it. Obviously I'm writing this with the results in hindsight, so nothing that really could help them decide.

The Great War has left more scars than goods to Italy, there are just a few "good things" that have survived this century coming from the war. One was the patriotism born as unity against the common enemy (Austria). I'm not obviously saying animosity is good and hating Austria is ok, just that it may have helped unity between people a bit (it was still a newborn country in many ways).

At least it was not all a big loss militarily speaking, Vittorio Veneto is well remembered today (as is Caporetto) and the "Canzone del Piave" was used as provisional national Anthem during WWII and after the Monarchy/Republic referendum held on the 2nd June 1946. But entering a war totally unprepared on a military/naval front is very stupid.

But to remark it, the "Vittoria Mutilata" sentiment was very real. All those efforts, those hard decisions, those fallen brothers and the victory is not even triumphant. No wonder some far-right sentiments became very popular after the war..

I wouldn't say they did so to gain more territory, moreso to keep their relatively recent acquisitions. They had a Serbian nationalist problem in Bosnia which they'd acquired from the Ottomans 35 years prior and so their attack on Serbia was one part face saving punitive war to avenge the slain heir and another part stamp out the perceived ongoing threat to their integrity.

But yeah, it was very much a case of punching a brick and the wall falls down upon you.

A very bad bluff that was made because extremists killed the heir that was also likely sympathetic to serbian interests. A giant victorian political mess with a dying empire at the center of the mess.

a bit of history I didnt know about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Alliance_(1882)

Hard to say. It was my understanding that Italy wanted Trieste and some other land from Austria-Hungary, so I think from that perspective they may not have wanted to be neutral. If the Entante won, and Italy stayed neutral, there would be little incentive for the Entante to give that land. Now I also don't think Italy (or anyone) had the foresight to see how the war would have ended and Italy never got everything it wanted. So they got a little bit at a huge cost. It's a gain in land, but loss in life. Was the loss of that life worth it? Probably not. Was the military leadership also very poor? Yes. Could other smaller events impact this? Absolutely. This answer may depend on what you're measuring and a much more complicated answer than something figured out on a reddit post.

Started by Austro-Hungary to gain more territory and it ended with the dissolution of Austro-Hungary ...

They would have been worse off if they joined the Central Powers. The French would have been a much tougher opponent than Austria Hungary and they would have been very vulnerable to the British Royal Navy. With that said, joining the Allies was also a bad idea. The Italians had half a million casualties in WW1 for very little gain after the war. Their best option would have been to sit the war out.

I think there are a number of issues with a lot of the statements.

The first one is the idea that Italy could have genuinely considered entering the war in the Central Powers' side. Reason being that the relationship between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire was anything but cordial. Remember, the Third War of Independence had ended barely 50 years before and ended with the Austro-Hungarian empire losing the last of it's major holdings in Italy. Although the spirit of the Risorgimento was no longer the guiding principle of Italian foreign policy, there were still elements of Italian society that believed that Italy had a natural right to Trieste, Dalmatia and Trentino. None of which the Austro-Hungarian empire was ready to cede.

Another element to consider is the Mediterranean. A lot if the theories are limited to what may have happened during a land-based war but ignores what would have happened at sea. The Austro-Hungarian empire didn't have a navy to speak of but both France and the UK had colonial holdings in North Africa and would have had the resources to wage a naval war Italy could have not won. Sure, naval warfare was nowhere near what it once was but it could still be effective. The British naval blockade of the North Sea contributed to starving Germany and was a contributing factor to its eventual surrender.

WWI was a pointless war, thus in and of itself a mistake.

Staying neutral would have benefited Italy the most, selling goods to both sides and avoiding a war it just wasn’t ready for.

Joining the Central Powers would just be entirely suicidal. Italy was dependent on French and British colonial possessions just to import enough food for Italy, let alone importing industrial resources to modernize their military.

A Franco-British blockade and bombardment of Italian port cities would have meant Italy starts 1915 in famine.

The main problem is that not only the Entente easily is capable of outbidding the CP, in 1914-15 they have all the motivation to do It and a better reputation due to their support in 1912. They even would begrudgingly maintain their promises - but nobody could predict Wilson's Fourteen Points back then.

Honestly the Italians were just something the allies wanted to use to stall the front, as they themselves had been in a serious struggle against the Germans, and stalling the Austrians was about the one thing they could do.

Neutral seems more likely than the central powers - it doesn't take a military genius to realize you're better off fighting the Austrians than the French, all else being equal.

(Edit: and political pressure was more on taking places like Trent/Trieste, not necessarily places like Savoy back from the French. I think that has more to do with Austria being weaker/perceived as easier to get those territories, but still)

Neutral would probably have been the better option in the long long term - does anyone for instance think the Netherlands made the wrong move not joining? But I agree that it would be very hard in the moment to argue for neutrality

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I appreciate the in-depth answer. Thank you.

It's more of a set of assumptions about 'Old Europe', of which the Basques and the Sami are the last remaining traces, versus the Indo-European versions. The various Indo-European cultures that were ancestral to modern cultures wrote about these cultures around them or they left linguistic traces in substrates and perhaps in the ways that Indo-European languages evolved and why they evolved in those ways.

It's also the same thing as why Arabs are Indigenous to the Middle East after conquering it in the 600s but the Greeks they replaced weren't in spite of being there for 1,000 years prior to that. The concept does have some semantic wordplay and double standards attached IRL.

It's not really that odd, it's a reality that Indo-European peoples moved into Europe like they did into Iran and the Middle East and India. There were peoples already living there, of whom the Sami and the Basques are the sole cultures to make it, and the Magyars and Finns are peoples who moved after the Indo-Europeans arrived in much more recent times.

They're descendants of cultures that migrated in a long time ago, though this applies to plenty of cultures throughout history that never get all the caveats applied to them.

Karelians are a Finnic people and Finno-Ugric peoples 'originated' in the interior of modern Russia. Finns and Karelians and Hungarians are all distant kin, linguistically (the Hungarians) or the equivalents of Germans and Austrians (Finns and Karelians). The other indigenous group are the Basques, not the Karelians.

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What are some old swears from medieval and renaissance times? I like to write as a little hobby, and would like some appropriate vocabulary for the more sailor-mouthed individuals.

For modern examples and context, you've got the classic "Fuck you" or "Fuck off" that's meant to be directed at another person that pisses you off. "Shit!", or "Fuck!" for when something goes wrong. And of course things like "Bitch" or "Shithead" that are simply direct insults.

What are your favourite books about ancient Greece? Any time period.

Edith Hamilton‘s Mythology is a great summary of Greek and Roman mythology.