The story of the dramatic post-war Julian period of the Gherdovich family saga. A permanent conflict that will become a collective drama 

by Ernesto Ferrante – 12/07/2020 – Source: Public Opinion

The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning Brothers Against, the debut novel by Paduan Valentino Quintana, was released on June 25 in all bookstores, again published by Leone Editore. It is entitled The Betrayed Border and tells in a scrupulous and realistic way the dramatic events of post-war Trieste and Venezia Giulia, inserted in the Gherdovich family saga.

The first pages “catapult” the reader into the midst of the 40 days of Tito’s occupation of Trieste, which, as the days went by, transformed from liberation from Nazi-fascism into a dramatic invasion. The personal, intense and heart-rending story of two brothers is grafted onto the broader history of a country and a city, one in exile in Switzerland and the other a member of the new and provisional city administration, supported by his future wife at the head of the Slovenian resistance, who, despite being veterans of the Battle of Tarnova Forest on opposing fronts, will choose to unite and collaborate for a new common ideal: to save their land, Venezia Giulia, from Tito’s expansionist aims.

Combining wounds, broken dreams and courage, the two brothers will give life to a vast resistance operation in Istria, thanks to the collaboration of the local National Liberation Committee, in order to safeguard the Italian nature of Venezia Giulia, brutally occupied by the nascent Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Between intrigues and thirst for power, the drama of the Gherdovich family will soon become collective. The protagonists, capable of overcoming physical and ideological barriers for an act of love, will have no way of stopping the decisions of the great powers, and will risk putting their very existence at risk. One of the protagonists will in fact be the victim of violence that will tear her body and soul apart for a long time. Feeling the devastating weight of the decisions of the Paris Peace Conference on themselves, the two brothers choose, as atonement for a sin that is not theirs, to help the exiles morally and materially, living with them in a refugee camp in the capital's Eur district.

If for almost all the other Italian cities the longed-for freedom had arrived at the end of 1945, for Venezia Giulia it was not so. In particular, the city of Trieste could, only on October 26, 1954 after the dramatic events of November 53, “become” definitively Italian for the second time.

The book's alternating events also retrace the birth of the Republic, the Constitution, the Vergarolla massacre, the first massacre of the newborn Italian Republic, the sad post-war period, the distressing pages of the exodus. A novel that confirms itself as a tribute to the history of Venezia Giulia and Italy in a period during which two brothers, apparently opposed, abandon previous disagreements in the name of an irrepressible ideal: freedom.

 

Valentino Quintana, The betrayed border, Leone Editore, Milan 2020, 384 pages, €12,90 – in all bookstores.