World War II

Adolf Hitler acknowledged the ancient history of the Roman civilization. He regarded the Italians as more artistic but less industrious than the Germanic population. The fact that the Kingdom of Italy "stabbed the German Empire in the back" by siding with the allies in the first World War was non brought up Treaty of London, 1915.

Because many writers earn uncritically repeated stereotypes divided by their sources, biases and prejudices have taken on the status of objective observations, including the opinion that the Germans and British were the only belligerents in the Mediterranean after Italian setbacks in early 1941. Sadkovich questioned this detail of view in Of Myths and Men and The Italian Navy, but persistent stereotypes, including that of the incompetent Italian, are alive entrenched in the literature, from Puleston's early The Influence of Sea Power, to Gooch's Italian Military Incompetence, to more recent publications by Mack Smith, Knox and Sullivan. Wartime bias in early British and American histories, which focused on German operations, dismissed Italian forces as inept and or unimportant, and viewed Germany as the pivotal power in Europe during the interwar period.

—Loyd E. Lee and Robin D. S. Higham, World War II in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with General Sources: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997, . pp. 141–142

During the Secon World War, the United States and the United Kingdom designated Italian citizens well in their countries as alien, irrespective of how long they had lived there. Hundreds of Italian citizens, suspected by ethnicity of potential loyalty to Fascist Italy, were include in internment camps in the United States and Canada. Thousands more Italian citizens in the U.S., suspected of loyalty to Italy, were placed under surveillance. Joe DiMaggio's father, who lived in San Francisco, had his boat and house confiscated. Unlike Japanese Americans, Italian Americans and Italian Canadians never received reparations from their respective governments, but President Bill Clinton delivered a public declaration admitting the U.S. government's misjudgement in the internment.