September has just begun, and in Year 5 (the final year of Italian high school) the history syllabus always restarts from the same point: the late nineteenth century, the Giolittian era (the years dominated by the prime minister Giovanni Giolitti), the First World War. It is the block of the first three or four weeks of lessons, and the first test or oral arrives already in October — too early to put things right if in September you only skimmed it.
There is one more reason to take this block seriously right now: it is the same topic that comes back at the maturità (Italy’s school-leaving exam) oral, in May, almost always linked to another subject — literature, philosophy, history of art. Studying it well now, calmly, means not having to rebuild it the week before the oral.
Here you will find what the test really asks in this period, the most frequent mistakes, two schemes to keep at hand and an example of how to answer aloud a linking question.
What the history test asks at the start of Year 5
In the first orals of Year 5 the teacher rarely asks just “list Giolitti’s reforms” or “when did the war begin”. They ask you to link: to distinguish two levels of causes, to assess a record with lights and shadows, to explain why Italy enters the war against the allies it was still formally bound to by a treaty. These are questions that require having understood the logic of events, not just having read them.
It is also why the Year 5 history test separates those who have worked on the textbook from those who have only skimmed it: dates and proper names everyone recovers at the last minute, the links they don’t.
The mistakes that cost the most marks
In the first tests and orals of Year 5 the same three or four mistakes always repeat.
The first is putting all the causes of the war on the same level: nationalisms, the arms race and the assassination at Sarajevo in a row, as if they weighed the same — they don’t weigh the same, and it is the point we talk about shortly.
The second is judging Giolitti in black and white — “great reformer” or “corrupt politician” — ignoring half the facts. The textbook does not ask you to take sides, but to hold both faces together.
The third is confusing Italy’s alliance with its entry into the war: in 1914 it is still in the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but in 1915 it enters the war precisely against Austria-Hungary — anyone who skips this step writes contradictory sentences without noticing.
The fourth is leaving the post-war period “hanging”, stopping at the 1918 armistice without reaching the crisis of the liberal state: the costliest mistake at the maturità oral, because that is where the examiner looks for the link with the next topic.
Giolitti: reformer or trasformista? The record you need for the test
Giovanni Giolitti dominates the Italian political scene from the early years of the twentieth century to 1914. Compared with the earlier governments he changes register: he no longer uses the army to repress strikes in the North, he extends insurance against accidents and old age, he nationalises the railways in 1905, and with the electoral law of 1912 he extends the vote to almost all adult men — the widest step towards universal male suffrage made up to that moment.
The same period shows the other side of the coin: in 1913 he relies on the Gentiloni pact, the informal agreement with moderate Catholics that exchanges their electoral support for commitments against divorce; in the South consent continues to pass through prefects and local notables more than through a programme; and in 1911 he opens the Libyan war, a costly colonial campaign that clashes with the image of an executive all about domestic reforms.
Hence the question the test almost always asks — “was Giolitti more a reformer or more a trasformista?” — and the full answer holds the two columns together, it does not choose just one:
| Reforms and openness | Limits and contradictions |
|---|---|
| No longer represses strikes with force, unlike the governments of the late nineteenth century | Keeps control of the vote in the South through prefects and local notables |
| Social legislation: insurance against accidents, old age, protection of work | Gentiloni pact (1913): Catholic consent is bought with commitments on issues like divorce |
| Nationalisation of the railways (1905) | Southern question never tackled at the root |
| 1912 electoral law: almost universal male suffrage | Libyan war (1911-12): costly colonial venture, in contradiction with the reformist profile |
The textbook calls this double track trasformismo: including in the system forces previously excluded — moderate socialists, Catholics — while using the same clientelist tools that those forces were supposed to overcome. Not a judgement to take for granted, but the concept to argue with the facts in the table.
The causes of the war: separating structural and occasional
The second point on which the difference between a failing grade and a high one is decided is distinguishing two levels of causes of the First World War, which the textbook treats separately.
The structural causes are the underlying conditions that make a general European conflict possible: nationalisms (French claims on Alsace-Lorraine, Italian irredentism over Trento and Trieste, Balkan tensions between Austro-Hungarian interests and Serbian nationalism), imperialism and colonial competition, the arms race — above all naval, between the United Kingdom and Germany — and the system of opposing alliances: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) against the Triple Entente (France, United Kingdom, Russia). They have existed for years and are not enough on their own to unleash the war, but they make it likely.
The occasional cause is the precise event that sets the mechanism off: the assassination at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, in which Archduke Francis Ferdinand is killed by a Bosnian nationalist. On its own it does not explain a world war; it is the already tense system of alliances that turns it in a few days into a conflict between all the great powers, with the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and the chain of declarations that follows.
| Level | Factors | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Structural | Nationalisms, imperialism, arms race, system of alliances | Make the conflict likely, mature over years |
| Occasional | Assassination at Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 | Triggers the conflict, but does not explain it on its own |
The sentence to have ready: the structural causes explain why the war was possible, the occasional cause why it broke out precisely in the summer of 1914 and not before or after. Anyone who reduces everything to Sarajevo stops at the superficial level; anyone who stops at the big causes without saying what lit the fuse at that moment, loses the other half of the answer.
From neutrality to intervention: how Italy decided
In August 1914 Italy, although a member of the Triple Alliance, declares neutrality: the official justification is that the pact was defensive in nature, and Austria-Hungary had attacked Serbia first. A year of debate between two camps begins.
The neutralists — most of the socialists, the Catholics, a good part of the Giolittian liberals — are convinced that Italy can obtain advantages by staying out of the conflict. The interventionists are a more heterogeneous front: nationalists, Futurists, democrats, and a group of former socialists — among them Mussolini, expelled from the party for this — who push to enter the war alongside the Entente.
What decides it is not the parliamentary debate. In April 1915 the Salandra-Sonnino government signs the Pact of London, a secret agreement with the Triple Entente that promises Italy, in exchange for intervening within a month, Trentino, South Tyrol up to the Brenner, Trieste and part of the Dalmatian coast. Parliament, with a neutralist majority, is not consulted. In the following weeks the interventionist demonstrations — the “radiant days of May” — put pressure on the king and on public opinion, and on 24 May 1915 Italy enters the war against Austria-Hungary.
The point the test wants to see: entry into the war does not come from an ordinary parliamentary decision, but from a confidential diplomatic agreement followed by pressure from the street that bypasses an assembly of the opposite leaning — a concrete case, not a generic statement about the “role of Parliament”.
War as a total fact: trench, economy, home front
On the Italian front the fighting is mainly along the Isonzo and on the Carso, with eleven battles that move the line by a few kilometres at the cost of enormous losses: it is trench warfare, static and wearing, very different from the war of movement foreseen in 1914. In October 1917 the rout of Caporetto forces the army to withdraw to the Piave; the holding of that line and the counter-offensive of Vittorio Veneto, between October and November 1918, lead to the armistice of Villa Giusti on 4 November.
The trench, however, is only one part of what the textbook calls total war: for the first time a conflict requires the mobilisation of a whole country, not just its armies. Industry converts to war production under state control, food rationing is introduced, and on the home front women take the place of men in factories and fields. The state also manages consent, with censorship of the press and of correspondence from the front and a propaganda that has to keep morale high in a war longer and bloodier than anyone had foreseen.
The linking question: a three-minute answer on the mutilated victory
The questions that open the history oral in Year 5 almost always ask you to link a specific fact to a broader consequence. One of the most frequent on this block is: “why does the mutilated victory weigh on the post-war crisis?”. Here is how we build it, in about three minutes.
“At the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, Italy obtains with the Treaty of Saint-Germain most of what was promised in the Pact of London: Trentino, South Tyrol up to the Brenner, Trieste and Istria. It does not obtain Dalmatia, assigned largely to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, nor Fiume, which was not even included in the Pact of London but which the nationalists claimed because of its Italian-majority population.
On this gap between expectations and result, Gabriele D’Annunzio coins the expression mutilated victory: the idea that Italy won the war on the field but lost it at the negotiating table. It is a nationalist slogan, not a neutral historiographical judgement — but it matters because it becomes a story that many Italians, veterans first of all, find convincing.
This story is welded to a crisis with concrete economic and social reasons: hundreds of thousands of unemployed veterans, inflation, and in 1919-1920 the red biennium (biennio rosso), occupations of factories and land throughout the country. Those who feel cheated by the peace and those who fear a revolution on the Russian model find, for opposite reasons, the same target: a liberal state that appears incapable of responding. In this double vacuum — nationalist resentment and social fear — the Fasci di combattimento are born in 1919, and in three years we arrive at the March on Rome of 1922. The mutilated victory alone does not explain fascism, but it is one of the two levers that early fascism uses to make its way — and that is why the syllabus puts it at the start of the next chapter.”
This answer earns the maximum because it starts from the specific fact, frames it as a political narrative and not as absolute truth, and links it to a concrete cause — not to a generic “climate of discontent” — of the rise of fascism.
The method, from now to October
With about three weeks before the first test, the most efficient order of work is this:
- Build the essential timeline: eight or ten dates, no more — 1911-12 Libyan war, 1912 electoral law, 1914 Sarajevo and Italian neutrality, 1915 Pact of London and intervention, 1917 Caporetto, 1918 Vittorio Veneto and armistice, 1919 peace treaties and mutilated victory, 1922 March on Rome.
- For Giolitti, write the two columns before reading the textbook’s judgement: reforms on one side, limits on the other, with facts and not adjectives.
- For the causes of the war, always keep two lists separate: what makes the war possible and what makes it break out at that moment.
- For Italian intervention, learn the sequence with who decides what: neutrality of the government, public debate, pact signed by the government, pressure from the street, final vote.
- Don’t leave 1918 as the end point: always draw the explicit arrow to the crisis of the liberal state, so the next topic in the syllabus doesn’t start from a hole.
How we work on this, in lessons
With students starting Year 5 we work on this block with the same scheme: first the timeline, then the two tables built together — not handed over ready-made — then the aloud simulation of the linking question, because saying it in three minutes without stumbling is trained by speaking, not just writing. It is the same reason why the fifth year asks for a different method from the other four: we talk about it in the guide on how to plan the maturità year from September.
To train on your own on the load of Year 5 tests you will find the simulated high school tests: at the moment they cover maths and physics, not history, but they give a concrete idea of the timed tests awaiting you from now to June. The correct answer is free and with no registration; the guided solution is unlocked with your first lesson.
Lessons are online and one-to-one, an hour at a time: single lesson or 10-hour package, plus a free 30-minute introductory call if we don’t know each other yet — the up-to-date rates are on the pricing page. Payment is offline — bank transfer, Satispay, PayPal, card, Apple Pay or Revolut. For the humanities subjects of the last three years, from history to philosophy, the full picture is on the humanities page.
For the philosophy of the same period, the thought that formed the background is that of Hegel and dialectic. For the study method for history orals, the post is history in Year 3: the method for oral tests.
If the Year 5 history syllabus is already a worry — or you just want to understand where to begin — write to us: the first 30-minute introductory call is free, and we look at your syllabus together before telling you how many lessons you really need.
