There Once was an Italian Region Called “Venezia Giulia”

Written by General Riccardo Basile

It might sound like a fairy tale, but it is not. This is the story of a region of Italy that used to exist, but today is no longer.

The region was enclosed between the Julian Alps to the north and the Adriatic Sea to the south; from the Isonzo river to the west, and to the east the watershed that passes from Mount Tricorno to Mount Nevoso and Mount Maggiore before descending onto the Quarnaro Gulf.

It included five Provinces: Trieste, Gorizia, Pola in Istria, Fiume in the Carnaro and Zara in Dalmatia.

Of these cities only two remained in Italy: Trieste, which was mutilated, and Gorizia, which was dismembered. Both today are included in the region “Friuli-Venezia Giulia”. There are many today who believe the name of this region is too long, so they shorted it to “Friuli” and omit “Venezia Giulia”: one can easily understand the disappointment of the Giulians!

The name “Venezia Giulia” was coined in 1863 by one of the greatest glottologists of the 19th century: Graziadio Isaia Ascoli of Gorizia.

The region had always been Italian according to geography, history, language, customs... and by free choice. In 27 BC it was one of the 11 regions of Italy, called “Regio X Venetia et Histria”.

Dante Alighieri, in canto IX of the Inferno, placed the region within the natural borders of the Italian peninsula.

Giosuè Carducci wrote to his friend Giuseppe Caprin in 1885, describing the region as a:

“...very beautiful and very noble Italian region, entirely Roman and Venetian, of the Italian Fatherland...”

Let's return to the early history of the region. For six centuries it was Roman and enjoyed the “Pax Romana”. Then there were long years during which it suffered from the successive barbarian invasions, the last of which was the Slavs.

Then, just as in the rest of the Italian peninsula, there was the rise of the Free Communes with their Statutes; this was followed by allegiance to the Republic of Venice; and then annexation to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and finally, after the victorious war of 1915-1918 (which for Italy was the Fourth War of Independence), there was the long-awaited reunion with Italy.

For nearly 2000 years the region has always preserved its Latin culture, language and Italian identity.

As proof of this, one could cite the geographical and maritime charts published by several countries years before the region was reunited with the Italian Nation. The names and localities were always named in Italian: Capodistria, Pola, Fiume, Cherso, Lussino, Zara, etc. Further confirmation of its Italianity can be seen by consulting the censuses of the time, including the Austrian ones, which indisputably indicate that the majority of the population was Italian, with numbers close to 100% in the cities and in the towns of the western coast of Istria.

Another proof of its identity emerges from the discovery of some data derived from historical investigations:

• In Istria, in 1914, four years before the victory of Vittorio Veneto, when the region was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 37 communes out of 50 were administered by Italians.

• In the First World War 2,107 volunteers from Giulia Venezia joined the ranks of the Italian Armed Forces. They truly risked their lives for Italy, because if they were captured they would be executed.

• In the Second World War, this region had the highest rate of human losses, which had 30 dead for every 1,000 inhabitants, far exceeding the national average of 10 dead for every 1,000.

We must remember also that Istria gave 14 recipients of the Gold Medal of Military Valour to the Italian Fatherland; Dalmatia gave 11; and the city of Fiume alone gave 5.

But a sad day appeared on the horizon of the history of these lands: Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

Tito, the leader of the Slavic Communist partisan formations created at the end of 1943 in order to free Yugoslava from foreigners and from bands of Ustashi (Croatian nationalists) and Chetniks (Serbian monarchists), also included in his plans not only the annexation of all of Venezia Giulia to the nascent “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”, but also the expulsion of all Italians from the area who had lived in that territory for millennia.

Never before in history did any of the peoples who trampled upon this region ever choose to replace the native population. Until now... The goal of the Croatian dictator was clear: to irreversibly change the character of the region by imposing a military conquest.

This plan, which was successfully completed, was candidly admitted by Milovan Gilas, one of Tito's closest associates, in an interview given in 1991 to the journal Panorama:

“In 1946 me and Edvard Kardelj went to Istria to...employ all kinds of pressure to persuade Italians to leave. So it was told to us and so it was done.”

The extermination of our fellow countrymen from Venezia Giulia took place in three stages:

• First phase, from September 9, 1943 to October 13, 1943, in Istria. (Note that it was the Germans, of all people, who temporarily prevented this ethnic cleansing from taking place.)

• Second phase, from May 1 to June 12, 1945, when the war ended, in the entire territory of Venezia Giulia, but especially in the Province of Trieste. (Fortunately the Anglo-Americans, better late than never, decided to push Tito and his partisans to the other side of the Morgan Line after June 12).

• And finally the third phase of the ethnic cleansing, but not the last one, took place following the Paris Peace Treaties and subsequent international agreements.

Let's take a closer look at these Treaties:

1. The diktat of February 10, 1947 allowed Yugoslavia to annex much of the region: practically the entire territory east and south of the Morgan Line.

2. The Memorandum of Understanding of London in 1954 permitted the return of Trieste to Italy (the so-called “Zone A”, which included the City of San Giusto) but inexplicably and arbitrarily refused to allow “Zone B” to return to Italy.

3. The Treaty of Osimo of 1975 definitively assigned “Zone B” to Yugoslavia, with the cities of Capodistria, Pirano, Umago, Cittanova and Buie, which were all italian cities since time immemorial.

It should be note that Zone B had 63,000 inhabitants: in the years from 1945 to 1956, 60,000 of them abandoned everything they had just to remain Italian. Tito had such desperate expansion plans towards Italy that he occupied Trieste nine days before occupying Zagreb and Ljubljana. He beat the Anglo-Americans by a single day: and his occupation was sufficient to create a deadly condition for the Italians.

Let's move on now from this bitter page of history. At least for the moment, let's take a look at some of the cities of this noble region.


Zara: The Pearl of the Adriatic

Zara was a Venetian city with narrow streets and squares, enclosed between two gates built by Michele Sanmicheli: the “Porta Terraferma” with a grand Lion of St. Mark, and the “Porta Marina” with the statue of St. Chrysogonus.

The Anglo-Americans, at Tito's request, razed Zara to the ground, dropping on it 61 kg of explosives for each square meter in 54 air bombings.

The city counted 4,000 dead; 85% of the buildings were destroyed.

In 1910 the writer and journalist Arturo Colautti defined the city as:

“...the last oasis of Italic civilization on the eastern coast of Adriatic; the last stronghold of the Latin race opposed to the barbaric mass of Croats, whom the hateful and fearful Habsburg government have unleashed in order to eventually submerge the Italians; the last view of Dantean thought seen from the Quarnaro...”

Zara was not a military base. It was not an important communications hub. It had no strategic importance. It was destroyed by the will of Tito, in order to erase forever that millennial lighthouse of Italian civilization on the Adriatic coast. The city had to be abandoned in mass by its inhabitants and today it is a Balkan city.


Fiume: The “Holocausted City”

Fiume was decorated with the Gold Medal on Civil Valour on May 22, 1924 by His Majesty the King of Italy Vittorio Emanuele III, in recognition of the sacrifices it made to join Italy. Senator Leo Valiani, in 1990 wrote:

“Fiume has been an Italian city since its foundation. Politically it was united with Italy only in 1924, but it has always been culturally and ethnically Italian.”

This is also evidenced by the graves of its cemetery.

Monsignor Luigi Torcoletti found that in the Cematary of Fiume 80.7% of the inscriptions from 1800-1919 (and therefore before the enterprise of Gabriele D'Annunzio) were written in Italian. At the end of 1945, 54,000 Fiumans out of 60,000 preferred exile to Yugoslav rule. This clearly demonstrates the Italian sentiment of the population.


Pola

Emperor Augustus, in honor of his daughter Julia, called this city “Pietas Julia”.

The census of 1921 gave the following results: 41,000 Italians, 5,000 Croats, 265 Slovenes, 2,718 belonging to other ethnicities.

The city, aware of what its fate would be following the Paris Peace Treaties, was completely emptied: 30,000 inhabitants of Pola, out of a population of 32,000, left the city forever.

The steamer “Toscana”, which had only 2,000 seats, made twelve journeys to the ports of Venice and Ancona.

The writer Silvio Benco, in the same year of 1947, described the exodus from Pola:

“They are leaving the homes of their Fathers, with the elderly, with their wives, with their children, with the very few belongings they were able to take with them, and the whole strange world is witnessing this. It's sad to think that in the world of today, in the disheartened world that emerged from such a terrible war, Pietas Julia no longer exists. But Pietas Julia, i.e. Pity for the Giulian People, does exist and always will exist in our Italian hearts, and in the hearts of all people who have a soul.”

During its last voyage, the “Toscana” also carried away the remains of Nazario Sauro, a native of Capodistria (incidentally, this is the Italian city with the highest number of soldiers decorated with Medals of Military Valour in relation to the size of its population). Sauro was an irredentist volunteer, Lieutenant of the Royal Navy, decorated with the Gold Medal and the Silver Medal of Military Valour, known in history as “a son of Istria, hero of Italy”.


Gorizia

Called “Santa Gorizia” (Holy Gorizia) because of its involvment in the twelve battles of the Isonzo. It's the city that witnessed the legendary sacrifice of Enrico Toti. It was saved after World War II only by a miracle! It was officially restored to Italian sovereignty on September 15, 1947.

Palmiro Togliatti, the historic leader of the Italian Communists, had offered Gorizia to Tito in exchange for Trieste. The Gorizians, indignant, rose up and proposed that Togliatti should give Tito something of his own, such as one of his own family members or personal belongings.

The new post-war borders took away dozens of towns, but even worse: it dismantled the urban center, giving Yugoslavia control over the Stations of Montesanto and San Marco, the sanatorium, the old Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, and many suburbs.


Trieste

Trieste is the ancient Roman colony of Tergeste. It is the City of Irredentists.

The most sought-after city, since the Italian Wars of Independence, by many Italians from every region of Italy, who gave their lives to liberate that city, dying with the name of Trieste on their lips. Many of them rest in the cemetery of Redipuglia.

From September 8, 1943 to October 26, 1954, Trieste was first under German occupation, then the very short but most devastating Slavic occupation, and lastly, for nine long years, the painful suffering under the Allied Military Government.

The Risiera of San Sabba and the Foibe of Basovizza and Monrupino are the terrible testimonies of the barbarism of the occupiers. The city remains Italian, but devoid of its natural backdrop of Istria, stifled by a tiny border running about 10 km from its grand Piazza dell'Unità d'Italia.


Conclusion

In conclusion... We want everyone to remember that Istria, Fiume and Zara were Italian, and today they are no longer what they once were: now they are something else. We remind people of this with a lump in our throat, but without any rancor.

We want to shout out the truth from the rooftops, so that the memory of the injustices suffered by this noble Italian region will not be forgotten. Our infinite solidarity is with our Giulian brothers who have lived through the martyrdom of the Foibe Massacres and the Exile.

They have imparted a lesson of civilization to the whole world, offering a clear example of composure, dignity and an unrequited love of country.

They have rebuilt their domestic hearth elsewhere, often in far-off lands, with much suffering and sacrifices, and around it they have created the conditions for living the language, traditions and values of Italian culture, often reaching prestigious positions in the social scale of their host countries.

They have honoured and continue to honour our Fatherland.

Let's close with an expression by Kipling, which leaves the door open to hope:

“Nothing is ever settled until it is settled with justice.”