The first bullet of the new year, I wish you all good health and all your wishes come true!

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Depart from Fum and enter the snow-capped, ice-covered Pannonian plain for a short stay in Zagreb, rich in history and culture; Crossing the railway bridge over the Danube, to the warm and fertile Hungarian plain with lush vegetation, to the beautiful and tranquil Budapest; Cruise along the Danube, relive the memories of your youth, and arrive in Vienna, the city of music with its rhythms and aromas of fine wine...... During their visit to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Natsuki couple were warmly accompanied by Emperor Karl I and Empress Zita, and truly appreciated the vastness and magnificence of the country, and saw its unique charm of multi-ethnic and multi-culture. The hospitality of the Habsburg royal family www.biquge.info impeccable and the details need not be complicated, and after more than half a month of travel, Natsuki and his party returned to Fum and embarked on a new voyage around the world.

The next stop of the "Cu-Chulin" was Venice, more than 200 kilometers from Fum.

Venice is a beautiful city, and it was built in the most unlikely places to build a city. This city of less than 8 square kilometers once held the most powerful manpower, material resources and power in all of Europe, but with the beginning of the Age of Discovery, its economic and trade position gradually weakened, and the Republic of Venice, which lasted for more than 1,000 years, was also destroyed by Napoleon's army and then occupied by Austria. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the Venetian region returned to Italy.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, whether in the pre-war years or in the post-war years, Venice's economic and trade prosperity has been far higher than that of Fum on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, but the former has developed slowly and tends to be saturated, and the latter has developed rapidly and vigorously, and there is a similar contrast between the economic and trade situation of the two countries behind them. Italy is becoming more and more prosperous due to the second industrial revolution, and its new industries are typical of southern Europe, and shipping is relatively developed, but its competitiveness in Europe and even the world is not strong; Austria-Hungary was a traditional industrial power, and arms, textiles, and machine building had a place in the international market.

Geographically, Italy is the closest country to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the nearly half century from 1815 to 1861, most of the territory of the former except for Sardinia was under the rule of the Habsburgs, so the two countries have a deep enmity in modern times, almost regard each other as mortal enemies, the German-Austrian-Italian Triple Alliance promoted by Bismarck is not only not monolithic, but buried with deep hidden dangers, if it were not for Germany to quickly provoke Britain and defeat ****, Germany and Austria joined forces to contain the Russian offensive on the Eastern Front, Italy is bound to turn against each other. After the Great War, Germany's industrial economy broke free from the shackles of its earlier shackles and left the European countries, the newly independent Ireland repeatedly achieved economic miracles, and even the twilight of Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey showed a clear recovery momentum, but Italy's economic situation stagnated, the country was burdened with heavy foreign debt, industrial production declined, and unemployment continued unabated. The political situation was volatile, and after more than three years of government changes after the war, neither Paulo Bosselli nor Vittorio Orlando could change the unfavorable situation of the Italian economic downturn.

Since his accession to the throne, Natsuki has visited many European countries, and Italy is one of the few places where he has not left a footprint. To this day, the intelligence ministries of Ireland and Germany and Austria continue to warn him in good faith that extremist civil society organizations in Italy may pose a threat to his life. This happened because the Italians did not forget the night battle in the Aeolian Sea in the autumn of 1912, when the Ottoman Turks inflicted heavy damage on the Italian navy with a German-aided fleet of high-speed torpedo boats, which dealt a severe blow to Italy's expansionist ambitions, leaving Italy in the war against the Ottoman Turks and far from achieving the desired strategic goals. During the Italian-Turkish War, there were hundreds of German military personnel to help the Ottoman army, Natsuki only appeared in the night battle of the Aeolian Sea, the German Navy kept this strictly secret, but the news flowed out of the Ottoman Empire, and his special identity and great contribution attracted the attention of the outside world, many Italians therefore counted the two ships sunk in that naval battle and nearly 1,000 officers and soldiers who died on his head, vowing to make this person pay for the blood.

The negative impact of the night battle in the Aeolian Sea was not only in the military dimension, the Italian admiral blamed the defeat on the aging of the ships and the obsolescence of the equipment, and demanded that the Italian government invest more money in the construction of the navy, and the expansion of armaments brought a short period of abnormal prosperity to Italy's heavy industry and military industry, but the economic momentum that lasted from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century turned around, and the debt borne by the government has continued from that time to the present. The Italians were very envious of the fact that Ireland watched the economy take off and the trilateral economic alliance led by Ireland and Austria-Hungary took off. They wanted to join the economic cooperative, and they did everything they could to keep their voices down and flatter, but the Irish government did not do anything, and it is not surprising that the Italians were jealous and hateful, and the old and the new were combined, and it was not surprising that some impulsive and reckless men would have extreme ideas.

It was for safety reasons that Natsuki only stayed in Venice, where the economy is better, and did not go to the Italian capital or other important cities. Under the pressure of public opinion at home, the Italian king Vittorio Emanuele III gave up his plan to go to Venice to meet with him, and only entrusted the head of government (chairman of the Council of Ministers) Orlando and others to meet him.

Although Natsuki doesn't have a crush on Italy, he is still interested in the unique scenery of Venice. In order to avoid the influence of political and diplomatic atmosphere, he and Charlotte disguised themselves and went on a pleasant day trip to Venice like ordinary tourists, kissing under the Bridge of Sighs, taking photos in St. Mark's Square, sipping Italian coffee in the open-air café on Via Elisabetta, and enjoying the romance and tranquility of the sunset......

Meetings with Italian military and political officials were not merely courteous, as Ireland was actively seeking external industrial orders, and Italy was eager to get out of its economic and other predicaments through cooperation with other countries.

However, it is clear that there are still some misunderstandings in the understanding of Italian officials about modern international economic and trade. The economic and trade association agreements signed by Ireland with Austria-Hungary and Spain have enabled trade between the three countries to get rid of the original tariff barriers and allow them to import various goods at prices equivalent to those in the domestic market, such as steel. Ireland does not have a developed metallurgical industry, shipbuilding, automobiles, aviation manufacturing needs of ordinary steel has been imported from Germany before, although Germany's steel industry ranks second in the world, but after the war still to supply naval ships and colonial construction, can not fully guarantee the supply to Ireland, Austria-Hungary's steel production is only one-sixth of Germany's, but in addition to meeting its own needs, there is still a considerable share of exports. Today, Ireland imports more than 100,000 tons of steel from Austria-Hungary every year, and the reduction in the cost of raw materials makes Irish industrial products more competitive in the international market, and the heavy industry of Austria-Hungary also benefits from stable orders, and the scale of the steel industry has expanded by 40% compared with the pre-war period, surpassing France and Russia, and ranking fourth in the world. Now, Italian officials are trying to convince the Irish king to choose the wrong time and the wrong target with a tax-free and low-price strategy, and the result is bound to be a nose in the face.

The IQ of Italian officials is alarming, but how much better can the generals of the army behave better? In front of Natsuki, they went to great lengths to praise the technical performance of their ships, in order to show that the Italian shipbuilding industry was of advanced standard, as if Ireland and Italy could benefit greatly in terms of technology, but the opposite was true. By the end of the war, the Italian navy had six dreadnoughts and several newer cruisers, ahead of the Austro-Hungarian navy, which had four dreadnoughts and a dozen old battleships as its backbone. Before the Austro-Hungarian Empire began construction of the Franz-Joseph I-class dreadnoughts, the Italian Navy had already put forward its own plan for dreadnoughts, but the economic situation and poor financial situation made the navy's ambitions remain on the drawing table. In order to catch up with the number one competitor, the Italian Navy carried forward the spirit of the tinker, and they sent two Andrea Doria-class battleships, which were only four years old, back to the dock for technical renovation, and according to the tradition of Italian battleship transformation, all 13 305 mm main guns of this class (three triples, two twins) were bored to 320 mm, so as to go beyond the technical scope of dreadnoughts, and Xuancheng was the first super-dreadnought installed in the Pan-Mediterranean countries.

Aside from the slightly superior personnel quality, training level and fighting will of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the modified Andrea-Doria-class battleships only had a numerical advantage in artillery in the face of the Franz-Joseph I-class, and all key performance such as speed, protection, and damage management were inferior. Considering that the efficiency of the Austro-Hungarian Navy's light ship replacement has surpassed that of Italy, if this trend continues, in a few years, the Italian Navy will completely lose its strategic superiority over the Austro-Hungarian Navy for more than half a century. Since the attitude of the German top brass has always been to favor Austria-Hungary and to co-opt and intimidate Italy, the Italians may have already had different intentions. At this meeting with the Italian military and political dignitaries, Natsuki was vaguely aware of this mentality from the words and deeds of his opponents, so he played Tai Chi with all kinds of flattery and flattery of the Italians. When the Cu-Chulin left Venice, the two sides signed only a few memorandums of mutual preferential terms in terms of normal trade, making it the least rewarding stop on Natsuki's honeymoon, but it was unprecedented, not unprecedented.

(End of chapter)