September 20, 1880 marked ten years since the Breach of Porta Pia, through which the troops of the Kingdom of Italy had conquered Rome, putting an end to the temporal power of the Popes and enriching the path of the Risorgimento with the conquest of what was to be the capital of a united Italy.

However, at the time, lands where the majority of the population spoke, felt and had Italian culture were still under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Trentino, Venezia Giulia (including Trieste, Gorizia and Istria), Fiume and the cities of the Dalmatian coast. Committed Italian patriots and intellectuals called those lands “unredeemed”, that is, not yet redeemed, that is, liberated, from foreign occupation. Irredentism was therefore the movement that spread in those Austro-Hungarian provinces and in the Italian Left (Mazzinians, Republicans, former Garibaldians) hoping for the annexation of these unredeemed lands to the Kingdom of Italy, born in 1861 and capable, with the Third War of Independence, of annexing only Veneto and Friuli.

And on that date marked by such an important decade and in these lands where the fight for Italianness was becoming increasingly intense, Nazario Sauro was born.

 

The youthful years

 

Koper, his hometown, was inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Italians; its streets, the churches decorated with the Lion of St. Mark, symbol of the Republic of Venice, which was present here for centuries, the architectural style of the buildings and the dialect accent: everything demonstrated the intimately Italian nature of this small port not far from Trieste, the most important port of the Habsburg Empire.

The historic bond with Venice had evolved during the nineteenth century into a desire to become part of a free and independent Italy, which many also idealized as a young nation and a bearer of civilization and freedom to other peoples still oppressed in Europe within the great empires: many young Capodistrians were educated with these ideals, including Nazario Sauro.

Little interested in dedicating himself to his studies, Nazario soon showed a vocation for his father's maritime profession, starting to work with him on the boats that operated along the eastern coast of the Adriatic. He would later become an employee of a shipping company and would eventually set up his own business, but each of his itineraries was an opportunity to memorize currents and shallows, study inlets and landing places, with the hope of one day putting this knowledge to good use in support of an action of the Italian Navy. His love of country combined with a desire for social justice did not find satisfaction in the Socialist Party, with an internationalist vocation, but rather in the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini, which he cultivated as a self-taught, without ever joining any political or cultural organization, although he knew and appreciated the animators, since the only reference with which he identified was Italy.

 

Alongside oppressed peoples

 

A lover of freedom and independence, he did not fight only for his land, but identified himself, with full Garibaldian spirit, with similar struggles that developed in other lands subjected to foreign domination. In his travels up and down the Adriatic he came into contact with Albanian patriots who opposed the domination of the Ottoman Empire and looked upon Italy with sympathy, seeing it as a privileged interlocutor for the development and protection of an independent Albania. Between 1908 and 1912 Sauro did not limit himself to supplying smuggled weapons to the guerrillas: he took part in some skirmishes and named his last daughter Albania, as a testimony of the love he felt for this land.

The children of Sauro and Caterina Steffè, on the other hand, had all received particularly evocative names: Nino (like Bixio, Giuseppe Garibaldi's lieutenant), Libero, Anita (like the wife of the general from Nice), Italo and Albania precisely.

In the meantime, the Capodistrian irredentism had gathered in the ranks of the Fascio Giovanile Istriano, founded on October 1911, XNUMX, among others, by his friends Pio Riego Gambini and Piero Almerigogna, with whom Sauro collaborated on various occasions. In particular, when Austria-Hungary entered the war with Serbia, these young patriots organized demonstrations of solidarity with the pro-Serbian Slavic patriots of the area, reconnecting with the Risorgimento tradition that saw Italy and Serbia as brothers in the fight for independence. If Italy had immediately entered the war against Austria, these young people were ready to go into hiding in order to develop guerrilla actions in the rear, but Rome persevering in neutrality, they decided to exfiltrate in order not to be enrolled in the imperial-royal army.

 

The outbreak of the First World War

 

Venice was the meeting place for many of these deserters and Sauro, who had been exempted from military service due to a wound to one eye, continued to travel back and forth between Trieste and the Istrian coast under false pretenses: his cover was maritime traffic, his intention was to study the Austrian defensive preparations and observe the movements of the Kriegsmarine, whose most important naval base was in Pola.

In January 1915 an earthquake devastated the Marsica, so Sauro and his companions, led by Giovanni Giuriati, reached Avezzano and provided assistance to the population, contributing to the reconstruction of the villages. In this way they demonstrated their brotherhood with the other Italians, introducing humble people from the deep Abruzzo to fellow countrymen who spoke the same language and wanted to become part of the same State. But the desire to test themselves in the field was great and Sauro repeatedly but in vain proposed to the commanders of the Italian Navy, to whom he assiduously provided information and news on the eastern Adriatic, to organize a landing "à la Pisacane" in Trieste or Capodistria in order to start a riot involving local elements or to create the casus belli between Rome and Vienna.

Finally, the bright days of May arrived and Italy was preparing to enter the war against Austria: almost foreseeing the fate that awaited him, Sauro entrusted his Venetian journalist friend Silvio Stringari with two letters on May 20, 1915, to be delivered respectively to his wife and his firstborn in the event of his death in battle. These are two documents in which the feelings of the father of the family recognize the priority of devotion to Italy and remain a spiritual testament, profound and moving, to his dearest relatives.

 

Italy enters the war

 

After Italy entered the war, Sauro made his skills available first of all to dredge the small port of Grado (GO) in such a way as to keep it constantly accessible to the torpedo boats that departed from there to carry out raids along the Istrian coast. He then took part in over sixty missions, piloting submarines, MAS and other light vessels in the inlets of the Julian coast, carrying out in particular a raid in the Gulf of Trieste and an action in the small port of Parenzo in Istria, where he destroyed with cannon fire the hangars that housed the seaplanes that periodically bombed Venice.

The mission aboard the submarine Giacinto Pullino would prove fatal. On the night between 30 and 31 July 1916, while attempting to enter the Carnaro to torpedo some transports anchored in Fiume, it ran aground near the Galiola rock lighthouse. Fearing being taken prisoner by the Austrians (if recognised, he risked being hanged as a deserter), he abandoned his unfortunate companions and tried to reach the coast in order to carry out his old plans for clandestine fighting in the enemy's rear areas. He was captured and tried anyway: some of his fellow citizens in military service, former colleagues and even his brother-in-law recognised him and the superhuman effort made by his mother and sister, questioned by the military tribunal meeting in Pola, to avoid revealing the identity of their relative, was in vain.

 

Death and memory of Sauro

 

On the following 10th August, the executioner Joseph Lang, who had been sent from Vienna even before the sentence had been pronounced, hanged Nazario Sauro. At the end of the conflict, in Istria finally united with Italy, Sauro's body, which had been hidden in unconsecrated ground, received an honorable burial in Pola and later his native Capodistria would erect an imposing monument in memory of the illustrious citizen.

The monumental complex of Koper and the remains of the irredentist martyr did not emerge unscathed from the Second World War. First, the German troops of the Adriatic Coast Operational Zone removed the bronze statues, turning it into an anti-aircraft emplacement; later, the Yugoslav occupation troops, who conquered Istria at the end of the conflict and unleashed a ferocious campaign of killings, deportations and violence against the Italian national community and opponents of Tito's authoritarian project, destroyed the monument and melted down the statues. The coffin containing the remains of Sauro, instead, followed the exodus of almost the entire population of Pola: when the peace negotiations assigned the Istrian capital to Yugoslavia, over 28.000 of the nearly 32.000 inhabitants fled. In one of the many sad journeys made by the ship Toscana carrying entire families with a few household goods from Pola to Italy, Sauro's coffin would have arrived in Venice to finally be placed in the Votive Temple of the Lido of Venice.

Lorenzo Salimbeni