Fourth Shore

The 4th Shore (in orange color in northern Libya), the southern part of Greater Italy, an Italian Fascist project to expand Italy's borders.

The Fourth Shore (in Italian Quarta Sponda) or Italian North Africa (ASI) was the name created by Benito Mussolini to refer to the Mediterranean shore of coastal colonial Italian Libya and WW II Italian Tunisia in the fascist era Kingdom of Italy, during the late Italian Colonial Empire period of Libya and the Maghreb.

Terminology

The term 4th Shore derives from the geography of Italy being a long and narrow peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean with two principle shorelines, the First Shore on the east along the Adriatic Sea and the Second Shore on the west along the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Adriatic Sea's opposite southern Balkans shore, with Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Albania, was planned for Italian expansion as the Third Shore, with Libya on the Mediterranean Sea becoming the fourth.^[1] Thus the 4th Shore was the southern part of Greater Italy, an early 1940s Fascist project of enlarging Italy's national borders around the Italy's Mare Nostrum.

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