As an Albanian I would say the Italians wanted to colonize Albania but before they could they built a lot of infrastructure so that the population could move over there and live in a modern context.
Could Fascist Italy have italianised Dalmatia and Albania?
- Thread starter PolishMagnet
- Start date
They did, Count Ciano was in charge of things and his plan was always to make Albania his personal fiefdom. Now I'm not sure the statistics, but there were Italian settlers coming in to certain areas. Tirana for instance was redesigned as a modern Italian town.
I think Italianizing Albania would have been very possible. By all accounts, it was a very clannish society not yet fully moved on from post-Ottoman authority with a very mixed religious make up and a notable Greek community. Using Italian as a lingua franca doesn't seem like a stretch to start, and if you at least absorb the local elites into Italian society (business, education, military, etc...) then you wind up with a notable Italian minority migrating over from Italy (including military servicemen serving in Albania and marrying into Albanian families) plus Italianized elites and then co-opted local minorities. Give it a few decades and you'd have Albanian regionalism be no bigger a deal than anywhere else in Italy.
Corsica already speaks Italian, and Nice has a large historical Italian minority... or, at least it used to.
Around 20.000 italians colonist plus other 20.000 as temporary workers at the time of WWII; IRC the plan was more or less to treat Albania as the URSS treated the baltic states
btw do you have the source for that topic. I was curious since I've been interested in this thing for a long time
HistoricalArthropod
Banned
Was there some expulsion of Italians from France that I've never heard of or were they just assimilated like the Germans of Alsace?
Ah I see.
I will be honest even though this is true, I am still impressed by the quality that the Italians did in building that infrastructure. A lot of those roads (Although laid over and expanded later) still exist and function well. Especially in Sassano, that place was built up originally by you guys. This is coming from a guy whose family fought against the Italians in 1920 and WWII
When WWII ended my family kept an injured Italian soldier until he got healthy and he went home