Although he had grown up in a family of mixed provenance and in a city which was part of the Austrian empire, the decision of Carlo Stuparich to follow his brother in moving to Florence for his university studies is seen by commentators as clear confirmation that in terms of the powerful nationalist currents of the times, his own commitment was to the recently formed Kingdom of Italy.

From an Austrian perspective, Trieste was increasingly perceived as a focus for dangerous Itlain separatism within the empire, and it was certainly case that the Stuparich brothers were far from unique among the new generation of school graduates in choosing to complete their education in Florence.

In addition to his friendship with Slataper, during his time as a student at Florence her remained conspicuously close to his elder brother Giani, who had also managed to achieve a relatively nonconfrontational relationship with their father while the boys were growing up together in Trieste.

[2][11][12] Stuparich also joined with his brother and with Slataper in becoming both a regular contributor to the anti-establishment and increasingly influential literary journal "La Voce" and an adherent to the intellectual currents with which the magazine and its founder.

The Italian government resisted domestic and international pressures to become involved militarily, insisting that the country was totally unprepared for such a drastic development.

The country was bound by long-established treaty commitments to fight alongside the Germans and the Austrians, and plenty of conservative traditionalist elements with links to the military backed the idea of doing so.

On the liberal side of politics, however, and among many risorgimento patriots, fighting alongside the former imperial power against France, which was seen as a beacon of revolutionary enlightenment ideals, was an anathema.

For Italian speaking risorgimento patriots who had grown up in the Austrian Littoral region surrounding Trieste, liberation from colonial status was still an aspiration for the future.

The British undertakings[15] which induced the Italian government to intervene militarily against Austria in May 1915 remained highly secret till after the war ended, but had these details been known to them, the Stuparich brothers and their friend Scipio Slataper, as committed Italian irredentists from Trieste,[16] would no doubt have welcomed the promises that their region would be transferred from Austria to Italy in the event of victory in the war by the French and their entente partners, the empires of Britain and Russia.

Within less than two weeks of Italy's declaration of war against Austria, all three men volunteered and were accepted for military service in the First Grenadiers’ Regiment of the Royal Italian Army.

He was shocked that the regular soldiers with whom they joined up seemed to totally lacking in the hatred for the enemy forces that he believed would be necessary to achieve a military victory.

Indeed, the mutual suspicion between the naive enthusiastic bloodlust of the newly arrived volunteers and the dulled disillusioned resignation of the soldiers who had been serving for a little longer and seen a little more became something of a theme during those early months of the war on Italy's northern front.