“The American, British and French Governments have decided to recommend that the Free Territory of Trieste be placed back under Italian sovereignty, which appears to be the best solution if one wishes to take into account the democratic aspirations of the population and the need to restore peace and stability in that region”: this was the most significant part of the Tripartite Declaration issued on 20 March 1948, after the question of the FTT had been far from being resolved for over a year.

The Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947, in fact, had left the fate of the Julian capital in suspense, outlining the constitution of a Free Territory of Trieste divided into a Zone A under Anglo-American military administration (essentially Trieste and its current province) and a Zone B under Yugoslav military administration (the districts of Capodistria – today in Slovenia – and Buie, today Croatia), pending the appointment of a Governor by the United Nations Security Council. This latter figure had not yet been identified at the beginning of 1948 and instead the Yugoslav regime proceeded with a creeping annexation of the lands under its control. Yet a military administration requires, according to international law, that an occupying power guarantees public order and the tranquility of residents with its troops, maintaining respect for the legislation previously in force, even if state sovereignty is suspended.

From the demarcation line between the two Zones to the Quieto River (the southern border of the FTT), however, Italian laws had become waste paper, the community of our compatriots lived in a climate of repression of patriotic demands and the institutions of the nascent Tito regime were gaining strength. On the international scene, the idyll within the anti-fascist coalition had also broken down and Winston Churchill had already had the opportunity to denounce in his speech at the American university of Fulton that an iron curtain was breaking Europe from Stettin to Trieste, precisely. But the attention of world public opinion was also focused on the Italian Republic, called to the polls for the first time on 18 April 1948: it was an electoral appointment in which the Western demands, represented by the Christian Democracy first and foremost, were called to confront one of the most robust communist parties in Western Europe, some of which feared possible revolutionary changes to come to power, taking advantage of the arsenals hidden at the end of the civil war by the communist partisans.

Wanting to comfort the patriotic spirit, the three Western powers proposed to the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi the return of Zone A of the newly established FTT to Italy (which already contributed to the administration with civilian personnel) or the declaration that the entire Territory should return under Italian sovereignty, something difficult to implement given the consolidated roots of the army and the Yugoslav state in Zone B. Fearing to be accused of having given up on Zone B by accepting the return of only Zone A, the Trentino statesman was satisfied with the declaration, which however had an important effect within the electoral campaign, above all because it made the PCI face up to its responsibilities as a party that in foreign policy had to comply first of all with the wishes of the Kremlin and only secondly with those that were national interests. Faced with predictable protests from Belgrade against the Tripartite Declaration, in fact, Moscow refused to adhere to the option formulated by the former allies of the Second World War, forcing its delegation in Italy to keep a low profile on the issue.

This Declaration, whose feasibility was in fact complex, nevertheless remained a constant point of reference for the claims of the Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian exiles and for the people of Trieste, who on 20 March 1953 organised a demonstration in which they asked for the document published 5 years earlier to be respected: from there began an escalation of events that would lead to the November Days, with deaths and injuries among the Julian protesters at the hands of the FTT civil police.

Even after the outcome of the political elections in favour of the DC, the question of the return of the TLT to Italian sovereignty remained topical (Lord Bevin reiterated the concept before the House of Commons on 4 May), however Tito's hegemonic aims towards the Albanian, Bulgarian and Greek communist parties, the dissatisfaction of the Titoist regime with the Soviet support in international politics that was becoming increasingly lukewarm and Stalin's fear that Tito wanted to question his leadership in international communism led to a sensational break.

On June 28, the Cominform, the coordination tool of the communist parties in the world, expelled the Yugoslavian Communist Party and the Belgrade regime took advantage of this to recycle itself as one of the founding countries of the so-called Non-Aligned bloc (that is, aligned neither with the USA nor with the USSR in the context of the Cold War), pursuing an autonomous path to socialism. The Belgrade regime was able to propose itself as an interlocutor of the Western countries, subsequently arriving at a defensive alliance with two NATO members such as Greece and Turkey (Bled Agreements, 1954), enjoying in the meantime a preferential treatment in the context of the Trieste question. Italy was a member state of NATO and an integrated ally, Yugoslavia had to be brought closer and therefore returning the entire TLT to Italian sovereignty had become definitively unfeasible: the London Memorandum first (1954) and the Treaty of Osimo later (1975) would establish as an internationally recognised border what was initially only a demarcation line.