Dear Marcello Veneziani,

I am writing to you after having read, together with many of us, your beautiful piece of the 13th of this month in La Verità entitled “ And lost Italy was found in Fiume ”.

As you know, the world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus brings together a people; many people distributed throughout Italy and the world who were forced to abandon their possessions and effects to safeguard their Italian identity and, with it, their freedom.

This segment of the Italian people is not dead at all, but alive and generative, and continues its work of testimony and patient mending with its land of origin, with the native Italian communities of Slovenia and Croatia and, even, with the governments of those countries, finally in the EU, where, if nothing else, discrimination on the basis of race is prevented.

All these people – the elderly, working age and young, born in Istria, Fiume or Dalmatia, or in refugee camps and today in our families – have been committed and risking for years: “for a lost and noble cause; not for money, not for selfies, but for that crazy love that is patriotic love, for historical memory and literary glory”, using the terms that you rightly use to define the action of the three boys who raised the Italian flag on the Governor's Palace in Fiume.

A river of first, second and third generation Fiume citizens, accompanied by as many Istrians, Quarnerians and Dalmatians, every year, in silence and without fanfare, testify in every Italian school but, above all, they work hard to put back in place Italian tombstones in cemeteries in Istria and Dalmatia, celebrate events and moments that mark and marked the history and Italian-speaking culture of the eastern Adriatic in the countries of origin, actively participate in the life of the indigenous communities with the sole aim of:
1. Maintain our Istrian-Venetian dialect in our land,
2. Transferring the Italian identity to the new generations,
3. Building a unique identity between those who were forced to leave and those who, for a thousand reasons, remained.

Our actions are not demonstrative, but effective, filled with the mad desire to think that after having lost the war and after the perpetuation of the damnatio memoriae instigated by the nationalist and communist victor, it is possible to bring out that Latin and Venetian soul that has tenuously remained alive.

Zadar was bombed 54 times, more than 10% of the civilian population died under the rubble, 90% of the city was destroyed. The intent was clear, a handful of 300 soldiers did not deserve so much attention from the Allies, it was, instead, 'extremely dangerous' that perhaps just one person remained alive, capable of testifying what Zadar was for Dalmatia. Yet, having to remove the tons of debris, a Roman forum emerged from under the rubble, still clearly visible today in the city center.

This episode is more emblematic than ever: the attempt to plunge an entire population into the abyss has instead allowed the re-emergence of the remains of a civilization that still today bear witness to and pose questions – to the distracted, the uncultured or the obtuse nationalists – about the identity of a tormented land.

Paradoxically, damnatio memoriae has brought back to life a people who peacefully and without revanchism or chauvinism bear witness to something other than what the establishment would have wanted or would still like to perpetrate, with its foolish and empty declarations or actions pathetically clinging to a blatantly false historical narrative.

We are very sorry that neither politics nor mainstream media notice this patient and tenacious ideal work that a part of the Italian people, every day, for free and throughout the year, embodies in their lives.

It is evident that in a society that in a couple of generations has gone from the 'great' ideals of justice and freedom, to the flattening towards a new God Mithra whose essence, by now, is only the adoration of the modern triad power-sex-money, the ideals of Homeland and Nation acted out and transformed into concrete interests in a rather limited manner. And this, alas, is true not only for Italy.

Each of our people, consciously or not, embodies the Carta del Carnaro, is not only a witness but a living example of what 'integration' means, for example, without having to give up love of country.

None of us claims the Italianity of Fiume, nor of Istria, nor of Dalmatia. Our task is to bear witness with our presence alone what the history of that land is. That is why we are a nuisance.

Years ago, when I was elected president of one of our Exile Associations, the usual spiteful people sent me messages overflowing with hatred, including one that said: “you will never see the Italian flag flying on your land again”.

Oh, what nonsense! That flag flies today in at least 200 buildings managed or owned by our Italian Communities in those lands. We don't need to put another one up on the sly.

Instead, we need people who roll up their sleeves and are willing to return with a straight back and without fear of their own identity. We need volunteers who work with us with the thousand projects in progress to promote those three points that we mentioned above.

We need people to help us convince the local authorities that restoring the original Italian street names in our land, as has happened and is happening for Fiume-Rijeka – the capital of culture 2020 -, is not an act that attacks the state administration that governs those places today, but a pure act of intellectual honesty and, if you like, of great culture.

'Our' civilization does not need wars and conflicts but only needs to allow those who come from lands that were once Venetian and for a few years Italian to freely say: "mi son un italian de Histria" and "mi son un italian del Dalmatia", without fear, saying it out loud right in the lands of origin, the same ones that preserve our heritage.

I do not believe that the rest of the Italian people, in their great majority, understands the tenacious and silent work, devoid of sensationalism or senators for life, of the part of the people represented here.

After all, our people have already metaphorically bombed not with a single chamber pot, but with repeated volleys, a political class that has operated in every way for our oblivion.

Antonio Ballarin
President of the Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles 

 

And the lost Italy was found in Fiume

by Marcello Veneziani – September 13, 2019 – The Truth

Call them crazy, ridiculous, anachronistic. Call them neo-fascists, as TV and Croatians have already done, to distance themselves and feel at peace with their conscience. But those three boys stopped in Fiume, because they raised the Italian flag on the Governor's Palace, on the centenary of D'Annunzio's enterprise in Fiume, make me sympathetic, perhaps envious. Or rather admiration. I have uncertain information about what happened, I know nothing about them, but if only we had more boys ready to risk for a lost, and noble, cause; not for money, not for selfies, but for that crazy love that is patriotic love, for historical memory and literary glory. If only we had more boys out of format, or rather extra format.

Yes, for goodness sake, I know that these enterprises are purely demonstrative, completely useless, they do not produce fruit and create some annoyance to diplomacy. But the most useless enterprises are the most noble, the absurd enterprises are those that leave a mark and remain impressed over time. Remember the enterprises of D'Annunzio, the leaflets on Vienna, the marine and submarine enterprises, and then the chamber pot thrown by the D'Annunzio followers on Montecitorio. For goodness sake "repetita non iuvant", but it is nice to see young people born in the year 2000 who consider history a living thing, open like a wound, controversial, to be written and not only already written, digested, evacuated and disappeared.

It is striking, indeed surprising, that in a time of oblivion, of historical forgetfulness and of a past so remote as to be now removed, there is some boy who remembers D'Annunzio, of those heroes, of that adventure of Italianness and perhaps of that Constitution of Carnaro that was truly and not just in a manner of speaking, the most beautiful in the world. Because it was written by a poet together with a great trade unionist, because it was written on his own skin, with his own verses, with a great ideal and civil tension, because he wanted to reconcile patriotic love with social justice, a love for Italianness that is sometimes pompous, perhaps rhetorical, but always obvious on one's own skin.

Yes, for goodness sake, I know well that claiming the Italianness of Fiume today is senseless. I know very well that Italy is temporarily absent, leave a message and it will call you back if it is a possible tomorrow. In the time of a mashed and stretched out Italy, that kisses the Eurocrats' slippers, aligns itself with political correctness, crowds into Euroconformism, the Italy that covers its ass and nails itself to its seats, there are young people who want to go against the current, they want to bear witness to a grotesque passion for that glorious half-corpse that is our country. Young people, I don't know who you are but, to put it in historical, prehistoric or eternal language, you have done honor to Italy.

An abyss, you say, between our today with its problems and those a hundred years ago, coming from wars and deeds, gestures now unrepeatable; true, but a greater abyss separates the motives of the politics of our time and the ideal motivations, a little insane, I agree, that push two boys to reopen a page of history in full clowncracy of transformation. D'Annunzio criticized the "Cagoia" who was in government, as he had ignominiously rechristened Nitti; he had not seen these…

But why are you bothering with Fiume-Rijeka, as the Croatians call it, now that it is preparing to become the European capital of culture for 2020, why are you going to create diplomatic incidents, people whisper even to the mayor of Trieste Roberto Di Piazza, and to the governor of the Abruzzi region, Marco Marsilio, who remember the Poet-Soldier and the sculptor Alessandro Verdi who carved the statue dedicated to D'Annunzio, branded as scandalous by the Croatians and their local "collaborators". Absurd, even if then, if Fiume became the European capital it owes it to Italian, European, Venetian civilization and also to the heroic enterprise of D'Annunzio and his two thousand six hundred legionaries. An enterprise that at the time pleased many, and not only the nationalists and fascists, indeed it caused some embarrassment for Mussolini; Gramsci liked it, Lenin was impressed, it attracted soldiers, heroes, friars and poets from many places in the world. Guglielmo Marconi arrived, FT Marinetti arrived, the world found itself facing a political celebration that was a '68 ante litteram but in an epic and literary version: the occupiers did not come from well-being but from the trenches, they had seen death in the face and not the TV of the kids. They had written works destined to last, not manuals for guerrilla warfare or comments on Mao's little thoughts...

Fiume also means foibe, Italians killed, deported and driven from their homes, Fiume means battles in the streets and trenches to reclaim their Italianness.

No one thinks that the future can be faced by going back to the past, no one is nostalgic for wars and violence. And not even for nationalisms; here we talk about Italian civilization, we talk about language, about Dante, about D'Annunzio, about works of art, about cities with an Italian, Catholic and European imprint, there are languages, legacies and evocative landscapes.

It's about understanding that we can't live in the present alone, we can't be satisfied with Conte and the daily circus on TV; we want to connect to the past, remember history, make comparisons, read events critically, say we are proud of our literary geniuses and our heroes. Because only by respecting the past will it be possible to have the future. The River of history flows relentlessly, it never stops; but like flowing water, it is also the tradition of a people that springs and flows from generation to generation, it changes in the forms and languages ​​of time but is transmitted. To remind us who we are, who we were, and, hopefully, who we will be.