The Battle of Adwa (Amharic: ; Tigrinya: ; Italian: battaglia di Adua, also spelled Adowa) was the climactic battle of the First Italo-Ethiopian War. The Ethiopian forces defeated the Italian invading force on Sunday 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa. The decisive victory thwarted the campaign of the Kingdom of Italy to expand its colonial empire in the Horn of Africa. By the end of the 19th century, European powers had carved up almost all of Africa after the Berlin Conference; only Ethiopia and Liberia still maintained their independence. Adwa became a pre-eminent symbol of pan-Africanism and secured Ethiopian sovereignty until the Second Italo-Ethiopian War forty years later.



Francesco Crispi (4 October 1818 – 12 August 1901) was an Italian patriot and statesman. He was among the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, a close friend and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and one of the architects of Italian unification in 1860. Crispi served as Prime Minister of Italy for six years, from 1887 to 1891, and again from 1893 to 1896, and was the first Prime Minister from Southern Italy. Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck, William Ewart Gladstone, and Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.Originally an Italian patriot and democrat liberal, Crispi went on to become a bellicose authoritarian prime minister and an ally and admirer of Bismarck. He was indefatigable in stirring up hostility toward France. His career ended amid controversy and failure: he got involved in a major banking scandal and fell from power in 1896 after the devastating loss of the Battle of Adwa, which repelled Italy's colonial ambitions over Ethiopia. Due to his authoritarian policies and style, Crispi is often regarded as a strongman and seen as a precursor of the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.