re: Italy was horrible in WW2

Italy was always a very fractured country. They spent more years controlled by the Catholic Church than as a united country after the fall of the Roman empire.
The regions had their own governments for generations that acted completely autonomously from one another. People in the North have almost nothing in common with the people in the south, etc. hard to bring a country together to fight when you don’t have a common purpose and sense of nationalism.
There women are certainly worth fighting for though.