Prof. Davide Rossi, professor of History and Technique of European Constitutions and Codifications at the University of Trieste and Vice President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Rijeka and Dalmatian Exiles, has published for Rubbettino Editore The Long Twentieth Century of the Adriatic Border: Institutional Transitions and Legal Changes, a volume that does not claim to be a general history of the legal and institutional culture of the Upper Adriatic lands in the contemporary age, for which a much different space and modality would be required, but, much less ambitiously, it offers a roundup of episodes, legal institutions, and international treaties, which follow a specific path of study that, over the years, has unraveled into a thousand threads and which we have attempted to recompose into a single thread.

Indeed, we attempted to focus on so-called transition periods, those specific moments that often represent genuine opportunities for innovation, the emergence of new models, or the merging of vastly different regulatory frameworks. We thus sought to recapture under-explored fragments of the border dimension, useful for completing the typical nuances of contested realities, in which nationalisms and ideologies have tragically overlapped and intermingled, leaving indelible marks.

In the brief span of less than a century, the Northern Adriatic has witnessed continuous shifts in sovereignty: from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Kingdom of Italy, from the Free Territory of Trieste to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to which must be added the ideological imprint of Fascism, first, and then Communistism. These processes have left indelible institutional and legal scars, amid resistance and innovation, persistence and attempts at reform. This volume aims to retrace this kaleidoscopic experience, highlighting the complexities that necessarily characterize the overlapping of different cultural sensibilities and presuppositions.