Okay I’m going to take a stab at this… its been a long time and I’m not doing any fact checking.

1. Italy was the center of the Roman world and reminders of Greek and Roman art, architecture, and great written works were all around.

2. Strong merchant class- The upper tier in Italy was not royalty but business owners who had the extra cash to pay for great works of art.

3. Location of Italy in the Mediterranean- gave Italy exposure to new ideas because of trade with non-western nations.

These are more or less long term reasons… I know there are short term reason also. but I hope this is a good start to the discussion.

Militarily Italy was a joke. The Italian army had success against the Ethiopians because the Italians used airplanes mounted with machine guns and bombs, used poison gas, and had grenades and modern rifles. Even so the terrain was so rugged an the military targets so few that the Italian army had a difficult time of it. When Mussolini invaded Greece, the Greeks defeated him. The Germans had to come to thier rescue. Italy didn’t invade France until France was already beaten by Germany (well, when Mussolini judged that it was beaten). When the British attacked the Italians in Libya, one of the Italian generals surrendered. The British commander went to parley and asked why he was surrendering. The Italian general was surrounded by boxes of ammunition, but he put his boot on a box of ammo and said, “As you can see, we are out of ammunition.” To this the British commander remarked, “Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few.” The Germans had an easy victory over the Poles because they launched a surprise attack and destroyed most of the Polish air force and tanks on the first day. The Russians invaded from the East, and the Poles were sliced to pieces. The French army was considered the finest in Europe, but it was hunkered down behind its defensive perimeter the Maginot Line. The French had more tanks than the German army and their tanks were better as well, but General Guderian came up with the unprecedented idea of using tanks in a single mass to punch through the French front, with the infantry close behind. Nobody had seen this tactic before and it was terrifying. In Africa Rommel was another superb tank commander. The British and the Germans were more or less evenly matched in North Africa and Rommel wasn’t defeated until the American army was thrown against him as well. Patton was a pretty good tank commander himself. It was public sentiment that made resistance to German and Italian aggression difficult for the British and the French. Those two nations suffered severely in WW I and hardly anyone in Britain or France wanted another war with Germany.