I sometimes think that the Italian Campaign is not given enough attention compared to the Western Front, the Eastern Front or the African Campaign. Is this understandable?

Probably! In terms of scale or decisive impact on the outcome of the war, the Italian campaign fades into insignificance, and while it was a bigger and more important campaign than that in North Africa, it lacks the drama and romance of the desert battles.

However, it perhaps deserves more attention and praise than it gets - in its own context it was a very successful and interesting campaign:

• It opened-up new airfields for allied airforces, well within range of important industrial facilities that were previously somewhat out of reach; before the Mustang was sweeping the skies of Germany and while casualty rates for allied fliers were at their peak, the Luftwaffe took very heavy casualties from fliers based in Italy (thousands of aircraft per month at the start) - at a time when the strategic bombing campaign was ramping-up and the Wehrmacht was reeling in the east this was very serious and very badly timed attrition for the Germans.

• The Italians got knocked-out of the war, and while their military achievements/potential were highly dubious, this deprived the Germans of hundreds of thousands of Italian garrison troops which needed to be replaced by Germans.

• The threat of further amphibious operations against the occupied Balkans (as was the wish of Churchill) and Southern France required larger German garrisons in those regions, where they were pretty useless overall.

• The German decision to occupy and defend Italy was a serious drain on manpower, ~22 divisions were required to answer the allied invasion of (roughly, it fluctuated) a dozen divisions. These forces included a panzer army and a parachute corps (strong elite forces) - it's impossible to argue that these forces (around 300k men) would not have useful elsewhere from '43-'44, and perhaps even game-changers in France or Belorussia/Poland, but we'll never know.

• The invasions of Sicily and Italy were invaluable practice-runs for Overlord, and blooded a number of totally green formations for the tough battles ahead; an ANZIO at Normandy would have been a disaster, and it was definately for the better that these types of cock-ups were ironed-out before the invasion of NW Europe.

So, not decisively important, but peripherally important - a WWII absent the invasion of Italy is arguably a much more difficult one for the allied armies fighting elsewhere. Considering the relative devotion of overall resource strongly favoured the allies, it was definately well worth doing.

The italian campaign isn't mentioned mainly because the entire thing boiled down to the allies attacking, and the axis retreating. However, it was incredibly important to the allies as it allowed 100% control over the Mediterranean, cutting the axis off from the valuable resources of the Balkands, removing Hitlers only ally capable of doing anything, and essentially taking the entire German Navy out of the question. What was once one of the most feared military forces in the world, was now almost useless.

Once the German Navy was out of the picture, this is what allowed the D-Day invasion to go mostly without naval interference. As bad as D-Day was in some places, it would have been much, much worse if the Germans had naval support at the time.

The defeat of Italy also meant that Hitler was now fighting a war against three nations by himself. His only remaining ally (Japan) had a very angry Russia in the way, and wasn't capable of doing anything. This also removed the only buffer they had. This made Germany trapped between the Americans, Great Britain, The Alps, the Finns, and the Russians and allowed them to Zero in on Berlin.