Italian ammunition quality as a preventable fleet weakness

What was the Italian Navy's most important weakness aside from command quality?

Ammunition quality control, made worse because the problem was known well before the war and could have been corrected.

Ammunition quality control was a central weakness of the Italian fleet. Variations in shells and propellant undermined the consistency that accurate naval gunnery required. This was not a surprise discovered only after combat began. Italian authorities knew of the problem before the war and had time to correct production standards, making the resulting combat penalty a failure of administration as much as technology.