Friday 25 October 2024 at 17:30 pm at the Regional Institute of Istrian-Fiuman-Dalmatian Culture, in via Torino 8: in Trieste will be inaugurated “1954. Trieste is Italian. Zone B is lost”, an exhibition curated by Piero Delbello (Director of IRCI).

The exhibition will remain open every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, until March 30, 2025. Opening hours: 10.30-12.30 and 16.30-18.30

From the exhibition catalogue, an excerpt from the preface by Piero Delbello.

1954, October 26, we got there. But how?

It is the slow agony of Venezia Giulia, a terminally ill patient who clings to life and always nourishes hopes. Too often disillusioned. On that fateful day, October 26, 1954, the immense crowd of Julians (Trieste, yes, but how many Istrian exiles among them!), after a night on the streets, all lashed by the bora and the rain that to call pouring is a very sweet adjective, welcomes the arrival of our troops in the sacred city of Italy, Trieste, finally reunited with the mother country.

After September 8, 1943, terror had spread throughout Venezia Giulia, tragedy had taken over Istria when Marshal Tito's partisans had entered the chaos of the Italian established order with violence and massacres. Istria then experienced the foibe. Occupied, soon after, by the Germans, it became a land of conflict and more death until 1945. And the end of the war, certainly not on April 25 as in the rest of Italy, never came. Trieste and Gorizia, not just Istria, also learned what Yugoslav occupation meant: forty-two days of deportations and death. Only on June 12 could a presumed air of freedom be breathed, when the Allies dislodged Tito's supporters. Presumed, because for Trieste it would have begun nine long years of foreign military government, English and American, and for Istria, in the meantime, the infinite time of a post-war period that did not mean peace. More deaths, more deportations, more disappearances, more a crowd of whom “no more news would be heard”.

On February 10, 1947, the peace treaty, extremely imposing for defeated Italy, meant that Pola was also lost. The massacre of Vergarolla had already shaken the souls of those who wanted to stay, because Pola was Italian, all Italian. They left en masse, a mass of 30 thousand, leaving only the skeleton of a city, the largest in Istria, deserted, in the silence of nothingness. It was the symbolic exodus, certainly not the beginning of leaving, but the one that would have struck most, for the mass ... of numbers.

All was lost. A pseudo Free Territory of Trieste was created, divided into two zones: the Julian capital, with a small strip of the province that had been, became “zone A”, under Anglo-American military administration, while Isola, Capodistria, Pirano and little else (but how important! And how Italian!) were “zone B”, with a Yugoslav trusteeship. When the time came for decisions, those that would bring Trieste to Italy and, in fact, zone B to Yugoslavia, “NO TO THE INFAMOUS BARTER” was written on the walls. But we were now at the end of 1954 and the war had been over (it should have been over) for more than nine years.

The world had changed, Tito had made his clever somersaults between breaking with the Soviet Union and winking, for convenience, at America. It had gone well for him. Much less so for the Julian people, uprooted, erased socially and psychologically, fanned out in one hundred and twenty locations throughout Italy, well “hosted” in as many refugee camps. Trieste, in its own way, continued to fight, with the peak of the deaths of November 1953. It still wasn't enough.

The sun of Italy would arrive only on October 26, 1954, on a day when the rain was pouring. But it was the day of judgment. A terrible judgment that simultaneously brought other strips of land of that strange and phantom Zone A, far from Italy. The border was moving again, always to our disfavor. From the mountains above Muggia, refugees from Faiti, Bosici, Santa Brigida, Crevatini were coming down toward the city, with tricolor handkerchiefs around their necks. Some of these had recently settled in the area, exiled from Istria. Another exodus, twice exiled.

It was the night between October 25 and 26, Trieste was about to return to Italy, but zone B was lost. Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini wrote at the time: “On the one hand emotion: emotion for the imminent arrival of our soldiers, on the other anguish: anguish for the detachment of zone B, anguish for the new step forward made by Tito's Yugoslavia towards the outskirts of the city”. An anguish that nothing could heal.

Piero Delbello
IRCI Director