I always find it really funny that Italy tried to invade Ethiopia twice and both times they got their shit kicked in.

You are welcome!

Were Italians considered aryans?

That’s a good question! Before the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in late 1935, relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich were mixed at best, thus for a few years many Reich philosophists considered the Italians to have been ‘non‐Aryan’. Quoting from Aaron Gillette’s Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, page 44:

The [anticommunist] ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, building on the ideas of Chamberlain and others, had wondered in his 1927 work The Future of German Foreign Policy (Der Zukunftsweg einer deutschen Aussenpolitik) if the Italians had enough “Aryan” blood in their veins to make the fascist experiment succeed.⁴⁵ Rosenberg claimed in his address inaugurating the 1934 academic year at the University of Munich that Europe had received its culture “five times consecutively from the ‘Nordic epicentrum.’”⁴⁶

Rosenberg wrote that the Germans had defended the Aryan race from the legions of Varius, which were not composed of Aryans. Other [NSDAP] writers claimed that Roman law was not a genuine expression of Aryan thought and civilization.⁴⁷ Nordic racism […] viewed the downfall of the Roman Empire as a consequence of polluted blood. Thus, the Italians were not a pure race, but a motley hybrid of various races, including the black African. Hitler certainly agreed with these sentiments, and informed Mussolini when the two met in June 1934 that all Mediterranean peoples were tainted by [African] blood.⁴⁸

However, with the gradual improvement in Italo‐German relations throughout the remainder of the Fascist era—both German and Italian Fascists realized that they needed each other—their racial philosophy became more nuanced and they distinguished Northern Italians, an ‘Aryan’ population, from the Southern Italians, a ‘Mediterranean’ one. Page 56:

Mussolini had always resented the inferiority complex many Italians felt based on German and Anglo‐Saxon racial propaganda. By Nordicizing the Italians, he now took an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. German propaganda against the non‐Nordic peoples certainly wouldn’t sting if Mussolini decided that the Italians were themselves Nordic. The Italians could now bask in the prestige of the Nordic race, as proclaimed by many of the German, French, and Anglo‐Saxon racist circles.

Mussolini’s […] conviction to assert this racial identity would reach a fever pitch in the summer of 1938, when the racial campaign was launched in earnest. The Aryan element was at that time awkwardly added to the fascist myth in an attempt to translate German martial values into the Italian psyche.

This Nordic transformation was probably aided by his low esteem for Southern Italians, the most indisputably “Mediterranean” element of Italy. Of course, Mussolini was himself a Northerner, from Romagna. Early in his premiership of Italy, Mussolini told Sem Benelli that he had “low esteem for Neapolitans in particular and southerners in general, exclaiming that, from Tuscany on down, the Italians, deep down, were not willing to do anything to be Italians.”³⁹

Thus, after 1936, when [Fascist] Italy was chained ever more tightly to its aggressive German neighbor, and Mussolini felt waves of admiration for the German military juggernaut, we find that the Italian people are transfigured into paragons of the Aryan race.

One of the most striking examples of the new racial orthodoxy transpired during a meeting in June 1938 between Mussolini, Guido Landra, Dino Alfieri, and probably Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of Education. At the meeting, Mussolini identified himself as a Nordic, and declared that Aryanism would replace Mediterraneanism in fascist propaganda.⁴⁰

(Emphasis added.)

I once saw several neofascists on a white nationalist forum make a similar contrast between Northern Italians (the ‘good’ ones) and Southern Italians (the ‘bad’ ones), in a thread griping about Italian‐Americans.

I really don’t know what aryan means, I guess.

Page 13:

Friedrich von Schlegel, in 1808, announced that German, Greek, and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. Schlegel concluded that most Europeans and northern Indians must have a common ancestor, which he called the Aryans. Linguistic and historical evidence suggested that the Aryans most likely originated from India or Central Asia, and had migrated as a body to Europe around 1000 BC. These Aryans were thought to embody all the moral and intellectual virtues that had eventually made the Europeans masters of the globe.

Thus began the history of a mythical concept that would cause so much controversy and pathos over the next 150 years. Still, the Aryans remained a great mystery. Were the Aryans one racial group, or simply a linguistic family of varying races? If they were one particular racial group, were they “pure” or “contaminated” by lesser breeds? From precisely where did they originate? What current European people (it being assumed that the Indians were greatly corrupted) had deviated the least from the original Aryan stock? What was the culture of the Aryans, and what of this culture had survived into modern times?

As you can see, even European racial philosophists couldn’t agree on the concept, so don’t feel guilty that you don’t understand it either.

the Nazis didn’t have any involvement in Africa until WW2 was well underway

Well, no, not quite (unless you consider 1931 the beginning of WWII). Egypt (Raiders of the Lost Ark was nonfictional in one way) was a notable exception; it was one of the few relatively open markets with growth prospects, and some Egyptian commodities, most notably cotton, attracted the interest of the Fascist markets. Thus, German capitalists increasingly negotiated with the capitalist gentiles of Egypt:

‘It appears from this example that rivalries between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were less severe in Egypt than in other markets. This assessment is backed by evidence from the rivalries between the German and Italian ports. Even though the ports of the North Sea and the Adriatic competed for the same transactions (see Chapter 8), this long-lasting battle did not prohibit German authorities from allowing the import of Egyptian agricultural products via Trieste, and even agreed to use the German-Italian clearing mechanism to pay for the goods Italian merchants bought in Egypt.’

(Source.)

Surprisingly, the Third Reich also sent a (modest) quantity of matériel to the Ethiopian army, not out of any sympathy for the Ethiopians — certainly not — but to prolong the war and convince the Kingdom of Italy that regardless of how it felt about a probable absorption of Austria, it needed the Reich’s help in the long run:

‘On the military level, it has now been established that Germany had helped Ethiopia to rearm prior to the outbreak of hostilities, in order to make sure that the country could fight against Italy. Hitler wished to avoid two extreme outcomes: defeat for Italy (which would shatter the prestige of European fascism in general) or a quick victory (which would enable Italy to use her newly-acquired prestige against Germany). The prolongation of the campaign enabled him to capitalise on his ‘good services’ to Italy, and to bring Italy closer to Germany by taking advantage of deteriorating Italo–British relations.’

(Source.)

I am glad that you brought this up, though, as it’s another topic that receives less attention than it should. On the face of it, friendly negotiations with any Africans may seem unlikely given that it doesn’t jive well with the Third Reich’s white supremacist bullshit, but at least until it could secure global dominance, Realpolitik had to be the order of the day.

Might be worth pointing out: Fascist Italy’s attempted colonization of Ethiopia was expressly for the benefit of the mother country, not for Catholics in general. Israel, on the other hand, has no mother country in that same sense, but is ostensibly for all Jews everywhere (DNA test notwithstanding). I have talked to American Jews who expressed reverence for the occupation not just because of a religious or ethnic predisposition, as with Italy and Ethiopia, but because they believe it to be a place they can “flee to” if another Shoah breaks out or whatnot (read: if Trump wins). Ignoring that American Jewry faces no such threat and the sheepishness of which the category of “settler” is collated into that of the refugee, there are material reasons for many Jews to throw their verbal weight behind the liquidation of Gaza which American Catholics did not.