by Lorenzo Salimbeni and Davide Rossi

Source: l'Adige – 26/10/2020

Winston Churchill's famous definition of the Iron Curtain in 1946 set its extremes at Stettin on the Baltic and Trieste on the Adriatic. Trieste had risen up not on April 25, 1945, but on the 30th, thanks to a National Liberation Committee that had had to face not only Nazi repression, but also denunciations and the will to conduct a parallel resistance by the communist partisans, both Italian and Slovenian and Croatian, who hoped for the annexation to the nascent Titoist Yugoslavia of the lands conquered by Italy at the cost of immense sacrifices during the First World War.

Trieste was a port connected, thanks to the infrastructure built by the Habsburg Empire, to a Central Europe over which the shadow of communist regimes aligned with the Soviet Union loomed, a city that after the apathy in the face of the Risorgimento uprisings of 1848 had become a “hotbed of Italians” and the capital of irredentism, as well as, together with the towns on the Istrian coast up to Fiume, a stronghold of Italianness with a hinterland inhabited mainly by Slovenes and Croats: in this scenario, the arrival of Anglo-American troops in the Adriatic port a few hours after the communist partisans marked the beginning of an exhausting diplomatic confrontation.

Not even the Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947 reached a solution, proposing the creation of a Free Territory of Trieste (whose Governor was never identified by the permanent members of the Security Council of the newly formed UN) divided into Zone A under Anglo-American military administration (essentially the province of Trieste) and B under Yugoslav military administration (the Istrian districts of Capodistria and Buie). On 20 March 1948 the United States, England and France committed to returning the FTT to Italy: it was a move that, on the eve of the elections of 18 April, embarrassed the PCI (already put in difficulty by the communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the arrival of the first generous aid from the Marshall Plan), as it was linked to the Soviet Union and communist Yugoslavia. Once the electoral deadline had passed, the declaration had no consequences, also because in June Tito, after having expanded his borders thanks to Soviet patronage, had been expelled from the Cominform, the coordination body between the communist parties, due to his hegemonic aims towards Greece, Bulgaria and Albania. The Yugoslav dictator placed himself among the leaders of the Non-Aligned Countries, found a Yugoslav way to socialism and guaranteed his security by forming an alliance with Greece and Turkey, members of NATO. An ambiguous actor in the opposition between the two Cold War blocs, Tito obtained preferential treatment in the negotiations for Trieste, so much so that in the summer of 1953 Prime Minister Pella mobilized the army to face Yugoslav provocations.

The incandescent climate led to the mobilizations of the people of Trieste in the square, who from November 3 to 6 reaffirmed their Italian identity even in the face of fire from the police of the Allied Military Government, which left six dead on the asphalt (plus a seventh who died later due to the injuries sustained), whose memory remained faded for decades and who were only rehabilitated in 2004, thanks to the President of the Republic Ciampi who awarded them the Gold Medal for Military Valor on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the return of the Italian administration to Trieste.

On 26 October 1954, as a result of the London Memorandum, in Zone A the Anglo-American military Administration had in fact given way to the Italian civil one; in B, to which some localities of the Municipality of Muggia had been incorporated, which allowed the Gulf of Trieste to be dominated, the Yugoslav Administration passed from military to civil. The jubilation of the Triestine people hid the bitterness of the exiles (a few thousand Istrians left their lands, joining the over 300.000 who had already abandoned the eastern Adriatic in the previous decade) who saw their legitimate expectations regarding the Istrian lands of Zone B curtailed.

On October 26, 1954, Piazza Unità was a real triumph, packed with cheering Italians and tricolor flags: that was probably the last true cry of patriotism of the twentieth century. Sergio Romano defined that date as the conclusion of the Risorgimento, even if the last page of the Adriatic Question would be written in Osimo on November 10, 1975, when hastily and far from the spotlight, Italy, in exchange for nothing, recognized Yugoslav sovereignty over the former Zone B.