Turkey's foreign policy and relations in the early Republican era, before and during World War II, has been subject to systematic and scholarly research, leading to numerous publications since the 1970s. Although no less significant than Britain, Germany, or the Soviet Union in shaping Turkish inter-war foreign policy and priorities, Italy does not seem to have received a similar degree of attention in this growing literature. Italy is usually treated in the works on Turkish foreign relations only as a threat that Turkey's foreign and strategic policy aimed to counter after 1934.