Abstract
Trieste flourished as part of Austria from 1382 until 1918, when it was considered one of the most prosperous Mediterranean seaports as well as a capital of literature and music. In the re-enactments organized for the centenary of the Great War 1914–18, the fact that Trieste was the decisive argument—casus belli that in 1915 drove the Kingdom of Italy into the conflict was too often ignored. Events in 1915 happened despite awareness on the Italian side that tearing the Trieste maritime emporium from its Central European hinterland would result in the drying up of the sources from which its wealth was derived. Thus Italy, eager to complete its ‘national’ unification process, unintentionally provoked the collapse of this maritime economy. From a demographic perspective, in 1914 Trieste was the third largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In spring 1915, when WWI seemed to be coming to an end due to the Anglo-French landing at the Dardanelles—a tragic illusion which ended in a bloodbath—the clash moved to the opposite side of the Mediterranean and into the mass of the European continent. So the myth of the “holy city” of Trieste was born, strongly contended between Italians and Austro-Germans apparently, but in reality between Italians and the Slavic subjects of the Habsburg crown.
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Notes
- 1.
The irreconcilable reasons of the economy with the national aspirations of the population, well known to the rulers of the Kingdom of Italy, had been clearly highlighted to the Italian intellectuals by A. Vivante (1912).
- 2.
In fact, a British unit had managed to cross the Turkish defence lines but withdrew before realizing it.
- 3.
Germans and part of the Slavs found a renewed, ephemeral unity of intent against the Italians between 1943 and 1945 inside the Adriatisches Kuestenland, the area of operations of the German army at the eastern borders of Italy.
- 4.
F. i., Trieste appears in The Riverworld saga, by Philip José Farmer.
- 5.
See: Richard Phillips. 2011 Decolonizing Travel: James/Jan Morris’s Geographies in Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations. Editors Justin D Edwards and Rune Graulund. Pages pp 85–103. Springer.
Jan Morris. 2001 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Simon and Schuster.
- 6.
The best shipyard in Italy, it was closed in 1966 on the basis of a restructuring plan for the sector. The city hosts now the Fincantieri headquarters, while in Monfalcone, to the other end of the gulf, rises the greatest yard of Italy.
- 7.
The hostility would culminate in 1936, with the forced departure of the archbishop Luigi Fogar (Ferrari, 1997).
- 8.
The problem of Fiume/Rijeka, disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia, like that of Danzig/Gdansk between Germany and Poland, anticipated the much longer and more serious issue of Trieste at the end of the Second World War.
The Free State of Fiume was an independent free state that existed between 1920 and 1924. Its territory of 28 km2 comprised the city of Fiume (now in Croatia and known as Rijeka) and rural areas to its north, with a corridor to its west connecting it to Italy.
- 9.
Encyclopedia Britannica. Fernand Braudel: French historian and educator. Written By: Carole K. Fink. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fernand-Braudel.
- 10.
It was the so called civilisation of "castellieri", X-VIII centuries B.C. (Burton, 1877).
- 11.
“Senseless slaughter”, so the pope Benedict XV expressed himself in a letter to the leaders of the belligerent nations sent on 1 August, 1917.
- 12.
We intend to refer to what will become the Italian region of Venezia Giulia (Julian Venice), which mainly included the former province of the Austrian Littoral (Benussi, 1903).
- 13.
On the attempts to respond to these changes, see Battisti (1979).
- 14.
The literature on war is, here as elsewhere, immense. The events on the part of the Empire are admirably summarized in Weber (1959). For the Italian side, among the newest essays, see Raffaelli (2015).
- 15.
Guglielmo Oberdan was a patriot from Trieste who was hanged in 1882 for trying to kill the Emperor Franz Joseph. He was the model that inspired the volunteers of Trieste and the rest of the Littoral when they deserted the Habsburg army to join the Italian one in the Great War.
- 16.
These architectural projects are reported in Godoli (1984).
- 17.
In addition to representing the sea outlet for the puszta grain exports, it managed to attract the rich market of emigration in the United States.
- 18.
The Habsburg territories were then divided between the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, actually another empire, not recognized as such because the Hungarian nobility wanted to better control the different Slavic ethnic groups.
- 19.
For a comparison with the conditions of Venice in the previous decades, see Zorzi (1985).
- 20.
Which has not experienced the effects of a new border.
- 21.
The ethnic question has been addressed by scholars from different countries, clearly in support of different solutions. The Italian position, still scientifically fairly balanced, can be read in Schiffrer (1990).
- 22.
Prior to the enforcing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed on September 10, 1919.
- 23.
There is a strong parallel with Fiume (Stadt Fiume mit Gebiet), declared in 1867 a Corpus Separatum from the Kingdom of Hungary for the simple reason that it was inhabited by a majority of Italians, a minority of Croats and a very limited population of Hungarians and Germans. This is the origin of D'Annunzio's Regency of Carnaro, then transformed into the Free State of Fiume (Treaty of Rapallo, 1920), annexed to Italy in 1924 with the Treaty of Rome.
- 24.
For an in-depth analysis of the legal aspects of the issue, see Udina (1979).
- 25.
This was the definitive closure of border disputes with Yugoslavia, which Italy was forced to accept in order to prevent that a future dissolution of this state (as in fact happened) could provoke a Soviet intervention in an area formally covered by the NATO umbrella.
- 26.
From the technical point of view, the emergence of this movement represented an experiment that was copied in 1994 by Silvio Berlusconi with the foundation of “Forza Italia". The List disrupted the political life of Trieste for 30 years, from 1976 to 2006.
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Battisti, G. (2020). Trieste: Many Dimensions of a Disputed Port-City—At the Crossroads of Spaces and Times. In: O'Reilly, G. (eds) Places of Memory and Legacies in an Age of Insecurities and Globalization. Key Challenges in Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60982-5_12
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