Down to the World War the contest remained pretty much a local one, attracting no great amount of attention from the Italians of the kingdom, or the outside Yugo-Slavs, or the world at large. The other Yugo-Slavs had more pressing problems nearer home. In Italy the Carbonari did, indeed, dream of an ‘Ausonian Republic,’ extending from Malta to the Trentino, and from Trieste to Cattaro; and such seems also to have been the ideal of Daniel Manin and other heroes of 1848. All Italians agreed that Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria belonged by nature to Italy as much as did the Trentino or Venetia. But Dante, in a much quoted passage, had described the eastern side of Istria as the natural limit of Italy: he had spoken of the “Quarnaro che Italia chiude.” Mazzini, the greatest Italian political thinker of the nineteenth century, had also taken this to be the eastern boundary of Italy, and had spoken in the loftiest terms of the union and fraternity that ought to reign between his countrymen and the Yugo-Slavs. There seems to be no evidence that Cavour thought seriously of claiming anything east of the Adriatic--certainly not Dalmatia. The Italian public thus had no very clear idea as to how much rightfully belonged to their country on the east; and as time wore on after the close of the Risorgimento period, that public more or less forgot about the Italian colonies beyond the Adriatic, or else gave them up as indefensible positions which there could be little hope of saving. Thus the Great War caught both Italians and Yugo-Slavs rather unprepared, and without very definite ideas or clear-cut programmes with respect to the Adriatic question. It is well known that the Italian government then, rather hastily perhaps, formulated its programme and its demands in the treaty of London, of April 26, 1915--the treaty signed by England, France, and Russia in order to secure Italy’s entry into the War. This treaty promised Italy, in case of victory, a new frontier including the southern Tyrol, all of Gorizia, Trieste, all Istria, northern Dalmatia as far as a line which cuts the coast just west of Traù, and several of the larger Dalmatian islands farther south, including Lissa and Curzola. It did not include Fiume, presumably because the assumption then was that Austria-Hungary would continue to exist after the War as a great power, which must have at least one port on the Adriatic.