The first to try were the most fervent supporters of the Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes and Croats that arose at the end of the First World War; during the Second World War, the Ustaša tried their hand at it first, followed by the Croatian nationalists who had infiltrated Tito's Yugoslavian People's Liberation Army; finally, it was the turn of the ultra-nationalists of independent Croatia in the 1990s: during the short century, many people tried to chisel them out or blow them up, but the winged lions of the Venetian Republic resisted and are still proudly displayed on the portals of the cities on the Istrian and Dalmatian coasts. In these effigies, the Gospel is sometimes spread out on pages bearing the inscription "Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus", but often it is closed under one lion's paw, while the other unsheaths a sword, facing the enemies of Venice.

From Capodistria, in present-day Slovenia, to Cattaro, a spectacular inlet in present-day Montenegro, the medieval and modern era saw the flourishing of the commercial fortunes of the Serenissima, which did not hesitate to trade with the hinterland dominated by the Turks even at the time when its galleys unloaded their broadsides on the Sultan's vessels. Having left the Venetian sphere of influence in 1358, the Republic of Ragusa played an even more accentuated role in relations with a hinterland often described in the chronicles of the time as rough, wild and backward. Formally linked first to the Kingdom of Hungary and later to the Sublime Porte, the State of Ragusa represented the fifth maritime republic in Italy and saw its fortunes collapse both due to the shift of large-scale trade towards the Atlantic routes and following a terrifying earthquake that devastated the city in 1667.

The Treaty of Campoformido in 1797 marked the end of the independence of Venice, ceded to the Austrian Empire, much to the disappointment of Ugo Foscolo and other patriots, as part of Napoleon's unscrupulous diplomacy. While the last Doge of Venice laid down the insignia of San Marco on May 12, the Montenegrin town of Perasto maintained its freedom until August 23, the day on which, upon the arrival of Austrian troops, Count Giuseppe Viscovich, captain of the guard, buried the last gonfalon of the Republic under the altar of the cathedral after having delivered that speech which culminated in the phrase: Ti con nu, nu con ti (You with us, we with you) which would become the motto, among others, of Gabriele d'Annunzio's Serenissima air squadron in the Great War.

The ephemeral Republic of Venice of 1848-49 was born first and foremost as a desire to recover an autonomy and freedom that the Habsburg domination had greatly reduced. When the banners of the lion of San Marco began to fly again, many from Istria and Dalmatia came to lend a hand, not least Niccolò Tommaseo from Sebenico, one of the noble fathers of the Italian language who held important positions in the government. From a municipalist and localist dimension, this insurrectional experience would quickly take on more markedly patriotic characteristics, calling fighters from all over Italy to its defense. In the following decades, the memory of the freedoms enjoyed at the time of the Serenissima would create the ideal humus for patriotic and irredentist action in Istria and later also in Dalmatia. In this last region, in fact, a real Dalmatian nationality had developed, in which the Italic language was the lingua franca in a coastline broken up into hundreds of islands and islets and a coast dominated by mountains, where the nationality of the populations living there was equally varied, including Italians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians. Only after the Third War of Independence did the authorities of the dual monarchy begin to look at the Italian component with suspicion and started the nefarious principle of divide and conquer, favoring the Croatian component to the detriment of the others. The expansion of suffrage, the opening of schools with Croatian as the language of instruction, the use of this language in public administration and the contextual reduction of Italian led to a Croatization that would have led the new generations to detach themselves from the loyalty of the old Dalmatian autonomist party and to move closer to irredentist positions.

Furthermore, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Habsburg authorities encouraged immigration from the Slovenian hinterland to Trieste and Gorizia, not only to inject manpower into the port and the nascent industrial plants, but also and above all to deal with the growing Italianness that was beginning to spread from the bourgeois strata to the popular level, especially thanks to the suggestions fueled by Garibaldi's enterprises. The "regnicoli" (citizens of the Kingdom of Italy who came to work in Austro-Hungarian territory) found it increasingly difficult to fit into the social and productive fabric, in which instead the Slovenians and Croatians were consolidated, grateful and loyal to Vienna for the freedoms and recognition of their identity that they had obtained. All these tensions spilled over from the local elective assemblies and also led to street clashes between opposing national factions, but above all they would flow into the nationalist motivations of the Great War.