On June 12, 1945, the communist occupation of Trieste, Gorizia, and Pola ended, as a result of the Belgrade Agreements signed by the Anglo-Americans and Yugoslavs, after the 9th Corps of Tito's army reached the Julian capital before the Allies on May 1. While the rest of Italy celebrated freedom and democracy, and despite the victorious uprising of the CLN in Trieste on April 30, the eastern border provinces experienced a new occupation, suffered another dictatorship, and mourned further losses: it was not liberation, but an attempt at annexation to the nascent communist Yugoslavia.

The mere fact of being Italian was enough to be thrown into a Karst sinkhole. A grim fate shared by thousands of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia and the inhabitants of the cities of Rijeka, Zadar, Pula, Trieste, and Gorizia.

The writer and essayist Mauro Tonino brings to light this page of history in his book The 40 Days of Terror. The Slavic-Communist Occupation of Gorizia and a Lapidary to Erase History's Omissions (Signs Publishing, Milan 2026) with Preface by Fausto Biloslavo and Introduction by Luca Urizio (President of the Gorizia Section of the National League).

"Mauro Tonino's Forty Days of Terror seals, in black and white, what happened in Gorizia at the hands of communist infoibators, thanks to unpublished documents unearthed from the Farnesina archives," writes journalist Fausto Biloslavo in the preface. "And it adds previously unpublished or little-known pieces of history, such as the plan to land Allied troops on ships of the Italian Royal Navy at Grado in 1944, which never materialized but which perhaps could have spared Trieste and Gorizia Tito's 'forty days of terror.'" And for the many martyrs who still lack a proper burial, a new Lapidary has been erected in Gorizia, bearing the inscription—the first and only monument in Italy—of those responsible: "At the hands of pro-Yugoslavian communist partisans."