IRCI – Regional Institute for Istrian-Fiuman-Dalmatian Culture inaugurates at the Istrian Museum, via Duca d'Aosta, 1 – Trieste – the exhibition dedicated to the PIETAS JULIA NAUTICAL SOCIETY on 7 March (Friday) 2014 at 17.00 pm


On January 21, 1947, after 60 years, the Pietas Julia Nautical Society, pressed by the sad events of the post-war period, ceased its activity in Istria and took the road to exile. Thus ended an era that had been a source of pride and passion for the city of Pola. In those sixty years, Pietas Julia had represented sporting spirit and civic commitment for the community. It had been a forerunner, since that distant 1886, of the nascent interest in physical activity but also a meeting point for free time and entertainment for young people and not only: it had been above all the witness of the patriotic sentiment that animated those lands still dominated by the Habsburg Empire. Because of this sentiment, it was opposed and persecuted by the Austrian authorities, until its forced dissolution, at the outbreak of the First World War, in 1915.
That epic is being revisited today through an exhibition promoted by the Regional Institute for Istrian-Fiumano-Dalmatian Culture in collaboration with the Pietas Julia Foundation, the organization that aims to collect and preserve the historical-sporting heritage of the ancient society of Polese, still active and operating in Sistiana. In fact, Pietas Julia is the only one, among the numerous nautical societies that arose in Istria in the second half of the 1800th century, to boast temporal continuity, up to the present day.
The exhibition, hosted on the ground floor of the Civic Museum of Istrian, Fiumana and Dalmatian Civilization, in via Torino 8, opens on March 7 and ends on April 3 and features a significant number of original documents and period photographs preserved in the archives of the Pietas Julia Foundation, as well as relics and mementos luckily saved at the time, together with the Society's boats.
The exhibition aims to highlight not only the aspects strictly linked to the sports of rowing and sailing, also practiced with success, but also the close relationship between the rowing club and the citizens, the moments of play, the civic commitment, the close connection with the fabric of the city. What is exhibited, in the original, represents only a part of what is kept in the archives of the Foundation, whose collection, we hope, will be able to grow in the future to contribute to the deepening of the role played by the Istrian and Julian sports world in the history of these lands.

IRCI – tel. 040.639188
www.irci.it

The Adriatic Observer