The borders of a state can be drawn in their lines according to four different criteria: geography, ethnography, history and the needs of the defense of the state itself.

Already in Roman times the defence of the Eastern Border was a matter of essential importance, being the most threatened of the entire Alpine chain, and therefore already in 128 BC a first external wall was built from Longatico to the shores of the Quarnero and from Fiume the Roman wall moved in the direction of Plana until it touched the slopes of Monte Nevoso, where a military camp was located.
permanent and particularly strategic, the Castrum Catalanum, which the local mountaineers referred to as “the wall of the pagans”.

Nothing changed if Carlo Combi wrote in 1866 "If Italy does not want the most jealous keys of the Kingdom in the hands of Austria, if not
wants this to be established on our soil on the most exposed flank, […] Istria lends itself admirably to this defensive role […] it can realise the project of an Italian quadrilateral on our last eastern borders which includes everything that is ours, it is at a
time the only one to cover all of Italy from its eastern side”.

But the bonds determined by history are also connected to economic interests with perpetual relations between peoples. Statesmen and economists believe that interest is the most tenacious bond between men, which can unite two or more peoples or separate a people from a State to unite it with another.

Eastern borders in constant movement, fluid until the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. It is no coincidence that the writer and playwright
French Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), in his famous novel The Kings in Exile, needed a State that was believable but not real, so as not to take away the novelist's freedom of action from his characters. Now what Kingdom could he find that was less true, less real in its borders, in its history and in its geography, if not the Kingdom of Illyria, placing there both Ljubljana, and Cattaro and some other real cities of Istria and Dalmatia? It is somewhat reminiscent of the Austro-Illyrian Littoral, an artificial name for the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy.

Lands of Venezia Giulia as defined by Matteo Giulio Bartoli, a linguist and glottologist born in Albona, who graduated in Vienna and lived in Turin, who identifies it as “the coast that radiates clearly from Latin minds”.

Column “Piccolo Readers for 140 Years” edited by the Multimedia Documentation Centre of Julian, Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Culture (CDM) and the Provincial Committee of Trieste of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia.

Source: The small – 26/10/2021