Up to the mid‐1920s, Italy continued to privilege relations of cultural cooperation with the former allied countries. Along with Czechoslovakia, Romania was also included in such cultural exchange.
This strategy continued during the first years of Fascism, above all through Contarini’s influence, which was truly remarkable in the period of transition from the liberal state to the Fascist régime. All initiatives that favoured more intense intellectual and political exchanges between the two nations were encouraged.
[…]
Italian policy towards the defeated countries underwent a remarkable change in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Mussolini’s revisionist offensive towards Balkan–Danube Europe aimed at aggregating these countries in a united bloc against France and the Little Entente. A strategy of Italian cultural penetration in Hungary and Bulgaria had already started in the first post‐war period, however.
[…]
There was a close connection between cultural and political propaganda and the attempt by Italian commercial and financial circles to replace Austrian–German hegemony in the Balkan–Danube area. Significant in this respect was the support Mussolini gave to a journey by Italian journalists, businessmen and deputies ‘to intensify commercial relations between Hungary and Italy’.
The journey was promoted in November 1922 by the active Circle of Economic Studies of Trieste, chaired by Professor Livi, consul of Hungary in Trieste, and by the Hungarian Foreign Affairs Society, chaired by Count Apponyi. The ‘Mattia Corvino’ welcomed the group in Budapest.
[…]
After years of cuts in allocations, in 1936–7 their allowance for specific items of expenditure was increased by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The institutes in Prague, Budapest, Sofia and Athens, strategically placed in eastern Europe, were strengthened, as were the more ‘peripheral’ ones in Warsaw and Tallinn.
(Emphasis added.)
Nevertheless, by the 1940s Italian neoimperialists could no longer seriously compete with their German allies, and yielded to them accordingly.
That Italy was no longer able to mediate — as an alleged arbiter — between the opposing forces in the Danube–Balkan area made way for [the Third Reich’s] initiative. A final attempt to boost the Italian political presence in the Balkans, in competition with Germany, was the signing, on 8 April 1943, of a cultural agreement with Romania, led by the pro‐Fascist Antonescu.
This was the last of a long series of such agreements between Italy and east European countries. A strengthening of propaganda institutions such as the Centro italo‐romeno di Studi corporativi, working since 1942 at the Istituto di cultura italiana of Bucharest, was expected. However, these late initiatives became completely ineffective as Romania moved definitively into the [Third Reich’s] orbit.
For a lengthy analysis of the Third Reich’s neoimperialism in Eastern Europe, see Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945.