Italian colonists in the Dodecanese the island of Rhodes. Approximately 40,000 Italian soldiers and sailors were on military duty in the Dodecanese islands in 1940. The appointment of Fascist quadrumvir Cesare Maria De Vecchi as governor of the Italian Aegean Islands in 1936 marked a turning point. De Vecchi promoted a more vigorous and forceful program of Italianization, which was only interrupted by Italy's entry in World War II in 1940. Indeed, he promoted the possible unification of the islands to Italy as part of the fascist ideal of an Imperial Italy. During World War II, Italy joined the Axis Powers, and used the Dodecanese
Island of the Jewel Island of the Jewel The Island of the Jewel () or Island of Sapphires () was a semi-legendary island in medieval Arabic cartography, said to lie in the Sea of Darkness near the equator, forming the eastern limit of the inhabited world. The island does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's "Geography" nor other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced "Book of the Description of the Earth" compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833. Ptolemy's map ended at 180° E. of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lay on the imagined eastern