What disastrous campaign are you talking about? The Italian conduct of war was not radically different from that carried out by the Entente on the Western Front, in an even more difficult scenario that to the difficulties of attacking an entrenched enemy added those of fighting in the high mountains. To this day it is the only high-intensity industrial war fought above 3,000 meters altitude.

Indeed, to be fair, Chief of Staff Cadorna interpreted the new type of warfare they faced better than his French and British counterparts. Noting that the density of the armies saturated the entire length of the front and thus made maneuver warfare impossible, he switched to a new strategy: to exhaust the enemy's human and material resources through frontal attacks that were aimed not at breaking through and outflanking, but at engaging the enemy in combat and procuring more casualties for him than his own side suffered. This is the same strategy implemented by von Falkenhayn at Verdun, which effectively annihilated the offensive capabilities of the French army. Cadorna got there a year earlier and, unlike von Falkenhayn, applied it with an army actually superior in men and resources to the enemy's.

In light of this one can explain the otherwise incomprehensible and repeated offensives on the Isonzo, which was in any case the only reasonable front for an Italian offensive and some of the attacks were requested by the Franco-British allies to divert German resources from the Western Front.

Paradoxically, by September 1917 Cadorna was one offensive away from victory. Austria-Hungary had used up almost everything it had, and the Austrian military command doubted that it could stop another Italian attack, which would have had the potential to reach Trieste and thus bring about the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Therefore they urgently asked Germany to intervene with a counteroffensive, which went down in history as Caporetto, that could repel the Italians and still hold Austria in place.

The retreat of Caporetto itself was for Cadorna precisely a retreat and not a disorderly escape. The Italian army fell back to the defensive line he had prepared for the eventuality of an enemy breakthrough, the Piave, while the rest of the Entente had stood further back on the Adige fearing a new Germanic success.

Obviously Cadorna was not the military genius of his time, but neither was he the last of the idiots. He was a general like so many others of that war, insensitive to the human losses suffered and also to the conditions of the infantrymen in the trenches. He was more capable and perhaps cynical in framing the conflict as a war to be won through the slow piece-by-piece destruction of the enemy, rather than hoping for glorious decisive offensives. Like the other generals of the first half of the conflict, he was removed and replaced by those who knew not only how to command, but also how to make the troops love him by seeing them as men and not just soldiers.

In short, I would like to understand where this myth of the "disasterous Italian campaign" comes from.

Sources: Marco Mondini, "The Chief. The Great War of General Luigi Cadorna," Il Mulino 2019