Abstract
Between 1945 and the mid-1950s about 250,000 Italians were forced to leave the cities and villages along the eastern border of Italy in which they and their families had lived for generations. These cities and villages were situated along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from the Gulf of Trieste and down along Istria and Dalmatia. This historical event — known in Italy as ‘the Exodus’ — has been repressed in the Italian collective memory and has not received much attention from historians. In his seminal work on exiles and refugees in Europe in the twentieth century, Michael Marrus does not even mention it, while Schechtman devoted to it barely half a page.1 The numbers involved were relatively small in comparison with similar mass expulsions or transfers that took place in Europe during the same period. It was, however, a unique phenomenon in modern Italian history, which left in its wake family tragedies and a considerable number of victims. Furthermore the Exodus was a caesura in the ancient and rich history of the Italian presence along the eastern Adriatic, exemplified in the artistic and cultural splendour of the main coastal towns such as Parenzo/Poreč, Fiume/Rijeka, Zara/Zadar, Spalato/Split and Ragusa/Dubrovnik.
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Notes
Michael R. Marras, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Joseph B. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 1945–1955, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962, p 5. The first documented study was published in Italy in 1980, edited by researchers from the Regional Institute for the Study of the Liberation Movement in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. In its preface, Giovanni Miccoli argues strongly for the need to deal with the Exodus even though it is controversial for the Italian Left.
Cristiana Colummi, Liliana Ferrari, Gianna Nassisi, Germano Trani (eds), Storia di un esodo. Istria 1945–1956, Trieste: Istituto Regionale per lo studio del movimento di liberazione nel Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 1980.
Elena Aga Rossi and Viktor Zaslavsky, Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997 (new enlarged edition 2008).
Pierluigi Pallante, Foibe. Memoria e futuro, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2008.
See the balanced review by Marina Cattaruzza, ‘L’esodo istriano: Questioni interpretative’, in Ricerche di storia politica, 1, 1999, pp. 27–48.
A recent example of the new dialogue between the different historiographies is to be found in the essays by Marta Verginella (a Slovene historian) and Mila Orlić (a Croat researcher) in Guido Crainz, Raoul Pupo, Silvia Salvatici (eds), Naufraghi della pace. Il 1945, i profughi e le memorie divise d’Europa, Rome: Donzelli, 2008, pp. 25–57.
Elio Apih, Italia, fascismo e antifascismo nella Venezia Giulia (1918–1943), Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1966.
See also Anna Vinci, ‘Il fascismo al confine orientale’, in Storia d’Italia: Il Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Turin: Einaudi, 2002, pp. 321ff.
Raul Pupo, Il lungo esodo: Istria: le persecuzioni, le foibe, l’esilio, Milan: Rizzoli, 2005, p. 33.
See Milica Kacin-Wohinz, ‘I programmi di snazionalizzazione degli sloveni e croati nella Venezia Giulia’, in Storia contemporanea in Friuli, 18, (1988), pp. 111ff.
Elio Apih, Trieste, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1988, p. 138.
Enzo Collotti, Fascismo e politica di potenza. La politica estera 1922–1939, Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000.
MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941. Politics and Strategy in Italy’s Last War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Marco Cuzzi, L’occupazione italiana della Slovenia (1941–1943), Rome: USSME, 1998.
Of fundamental importance is the document collection edited by Tone Ferenc, La provincia “italiana” di Lubiana. Documenti 1941–1943, Udine: Istituto Regionale, 1994.
See Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, I campi del duce. L’internamento civile nell’Italia fascista (1940–1943), Turin: Einaudi, 2004.
Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 412.
Nevenka Troha, ‘Il movimento di liberazione sloveno e i confini occidentali sloveni’, Qualestoria, 31, 2003, p. 36f.
One of the most balanced studies is Raul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003.
Karl Stuhlpfarrer, Le zone d’operazione Prealpi e Litorale Adriatico 1943–1945, Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1979.
One should not underestimate the hegemonic ambitions harboured in National-Socialist Austrian environments towards this region: See Enzo Collotti, Il Litorale Adriatico nel Nuovo Ordine Europeo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974.
Galliano Fogar, Sotto l’occupazione nazista nelle province orientali, Udine: Del Bianco, 1968.
Roberto Gualtieri, Togliatti e la politica estera italiana. Dalla Resistenza al trattato di pace 1943–1947, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1995.
On this complex course of events, see Daiana Franceschini, Porzûs. La Resistenza lacerata, Trieste: Istituto Regionale, 1996.
Geoffrey Cox, The Race for Trieste, London: Kimber, 1977.
See also Ballinger’s chapter on the post-war developments in Trieste. For a good analysis of the Trieste question, see Giampaolo Valdevit, La questione di Trieste 1941–1954. Politica internazionale e contesto locale, Milan: Angeli, 1986. These events ended in 1954 with the return of Trieste and Zone A to Italian rule.
Marina Cattaruzza, L’Italia e il confine orientale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007, p. 294.
Pupo, ‘L’esodo degli italiani da Zara, da Fiume e dall’Istria. Un quadro fattuale’ in Marina Cattaruzza, Marco Dogo and Raul Pupo (eds), Esodi. Trasferimenti forzati di popolazione nel Novecento europeo, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000, p. 186.
See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Nationalitätenpolitik in Jugoslawien. Die deutsche Minderheit 1918–1978, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980.
Some experts like the historian Ernesto Sestan were convinced that the majority of the population was Slav and would therefore vote to stay within Yugoslavia. Sestan’s report, commissioned by the Italian government, was recently republished by Giulio Cervani with the title Venezia Giulia. Lineamenti di una storia etnica e culturale, Udine: Del Bianco, 1997.
See Alfredo Bonelli, Fra Stalin e Tito. Cominformisti a Fiume 1948–1956, Trieste: Istituto Regionale, 1994
and Costantino Di Sante, Nei campi di Tito. Soldati, deportati e prigionieri di guerra italiani in Jugoslavia (1941–1952), Verona: Ombre corte, 2007.
Antonio Colella (ed.), L’esodo dalle terre adriatiche. Rilevazioni statistiche, Rome: Opera profughi giuliani e dalmati, 1958.
For a ground-breaking study of the settlement of the refugees in the Trentino — Alto Adige region, see Elena Tonezzer, Volti di un esodo, Trento: Museo Storico in Trento, 2006.
The isolation of Trieste from Italy, fuelled by the resentments of the refugees, gave birth to an extreme nationalist and autonomist tradition in the city which would survive for a long time. See the interesting memoirs of one of the protagonists of that political period: Corrado Beici, Trieste. Memorie di trentanni (1945–1975), Brescia: Morcelliana, 1989.
See the pioneering research based mostly on oral sources by Gloria Nemec, Un paese perfetto. Storia e memoria di una comunità in esilio. Grisignano d’Istria 1930–1960, Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1998.
More recently Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile. Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
For a general picture, see Milica Kacin-Wohinz and Jože Pirjeveč (eds), Storia degli sloveni in Italia 1866–1998, Venice: Marsilio, 1998.
Theodor Veiter, ‘Soziale Aspekte der italienischen Flüchtlinge aus den adriatischen Küstengebiete’, in Theo Mayer-Maly, Albert Nowak and Theodor Tomandl (eds), Festschrift für Hans Schmitz, Vienna, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1967, vol. II, p. 280.
Guido Crainz, Il dolore e l’esilio. L’Istria e le memorie divise d’Europa, Rome: Donzelli, 2005
and Perrti Ahonen, Gustavo Corni, Jerzy Kochanowski, Rainer Schulze, Tamás Stark and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements during the War and in Its Aftermath, Oxford: Berg, 2008.
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Corni, G. (2011). The Exodus of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, 1945–56. In: Reinisch, J., White, E. (eds) The Disentanglement of Populations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297685_4
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