When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in the summer of 1914, sparking the First World War, hundreds of young Italians who were still subjects of the Habsburg Empire fled to the Kingdom of Italy to avoid answering Emperor Franz Joseph's call to arms.

The people of Trento and Trieste, Gorizia and Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia thus strengthened the irredentist component within the interventionist front, which called for Italy to enter the conflict to carry out the Fourth War of Independence necessary to complete the process of national unification begun with the Risorgimento and interrupted on 20 September 1870 with the breach of Porta Pia which led to the annexation of Rome.

Some, like the Trentino geographer Cesare Battisti, traveled the length and breadth of the peninsula with heated speeches, while others already enlisted as volunteers awaiting the declaration of war.

During the period of neutrality, Italy was struck by a terrible earthquake, just a few years after the one that destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria. It seems that at the same time, someone in Vienna, then Italy's ally in the Triple Alliance, wanted to launch a surprise attack on Italy to reclaim Lombardy-Venetia.

On January 13, 1915, a violent earthquake struck the Marsica region of Abruzzo, reducing Avezzano and other towns to rubble. Army detachments were mobilized to provide assistance to the earthquake victims, and among those who volunteered were the redeemed volunteers of the Royal Army, Nazario Sauro first and foremost. He was present as a journalist for the Bologna newspaper. Rest of the Carlino even an irredentist sui generis, the Triestine Scipio Slataper, who wrote a precise correspondence from the areas hit by the earthquake.

The writer Mauro Jr. Alonzi talks about it in an essay published in Kindle electronic format: The Marsica earthquake in articles by Scipio Slataper and Giuseppe Prezzolini 

https://www.amazon.it/terremoto-articoli-Slataper-Giuseppe-Prezzolini-ebook/dp/B014DDE9VA

This short essay aims to recount the Marsican earthquake through the articles and words of Scipio Slataper and Giuseppe Prezzolini, articles rich in data and facts, and significant food for thought. They shed light not only on the seismic event itself and the damage it caused, both human and material, as any news report could do, but they also delve into the region, describing the Marsica and the affected neighboring areas, such as the Liri Valley and Sora, and addressing the social and economic issues that characterized them.

The work is divided into nine paragraphs, the titles of which are taken from the main article to which they refer. The first six paragraphs refer to Slataper's chronicle, which from January 15th to 22nd sent ten articles to the Rest of the Carlino (on some days he wrote more than one), and closes with the three by Prezzolini: the first, written in Rome and sent to People of Italy on January 15th, the second, again from Rome on January 21st, after having been three days in Marsica, and the last, appeared on the People of Italy the 27 January.