Why an Italian fighter hybrid might have answered a real need

Could a hybrid carrier have worked better for the Italian Navy?

Possibly, because a fighter-focused ship could have supplied local fleet air defence while land bases continued to provide much of Italy's strike power.

The Regia Marina shows why the hybrid concept was not automatically irrational in every setting. In the Mediterranean, Italian land-based aircraft could furnish striking power, but their transit time and separate command arrangements limited continuous cover over a fleet. A hybrid carrying fighters might have addressed this defensive shortfall more directly than the Japanese Ise conversion, whose reconnaissance and dive-bomber group did not match the claimed air-defence rationale. This remains a counterfactual, not a claim about a completed Italian design.