“He was a politician who determined the contemporary history of our territory”. With these words, the director of the Rovinj Historical Research Centre Raul Marsetič managed to highlight the figure of the historical mayor of Pula Lodovico Rizzi, a fundamental figure for the growth and development of the city of Arena between the 19th and 20th centuries, but who too many still do not know, or know too little about.

These were the words of Raul Marsetič, spoken yesterday evening at the Italian Community of Pula, where Frank Wieggermann's book " From the Kaiser to the Duce: Lodovico Rizzi (1859-1945) – An Austro-Italian Career" was presented to a large audience . This is issue 50 of the CRS Proceedings Series, translated into Italian by Vito Paoletić.

With Rizzi as mayor, the first telephone exchange was opened (1891), a joint stock company for the production of gas was established, the covered market was built (1903), a bank and a savings bank were founded, medical teams were organized to intervene promptly in the event of epidemics, and the new elementary school of S. Martino was built. In 1902, in Pola, it was Emperor Franz Joseph himself who congratulated Rizzi for the “flourishing development of Pola”.

Historian Kristjan Knez, director of the Italian Carlo Combi Center in Capodistria, one of the founders and currently president of the Society of Historical and Geographical Studies in Piran, starting from the pages of Wieggermann's book, presented the figure of Rizzi in the political context of Istria between the end of the 1920th and the beginning of the XNUMXth century. He did so by drawing a parallel with the figure of another Italian politician from Istria at the time, Francesco Salata, who had been a political student of Rizzi but who, at the outbreak of the First World War, moved to Italy where in XNUMX he was appointed senator of the Kingdom of Italy, while with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, writes Wieggermann, Rizzi was instead left empty-handed.

Knez highlighted what Wieggermann wrote about Rizzi: “he certainly did not pursue an irredentist policy. Publicly he did not present himself as a supporter of radical separatism. His political interlocutor was the Austrian state, with which, however, he did not identify himself”.

The historian from Piran also dwelt on Rizzi's political activity at the provincial, Istrian level, indicating him, with Matko Laginja on the Croatian side, as one of the supporters of the initiation of that compromise which, despite the opposition of both Italian and Croatian extremists, who had slowed down its application, would have led to the progressive recognition of the rights of the Croatians of Istria, starting with the use of the language in the provincial Diet.

No monograph had ever been written about Lodovico Rizzi, as Wieggermann explains in the introduction, there is no personal legacy and not even autographed documents intended for the public. His son Nicolò (1900-1978) had collected the family's private documentation, including Lodovico Rizzi's diaries (from 1903 to 1914), but after the Second World War he took it away from Pola, first to Venezuela, then to Bolzano and finally to Trieste. Today Lodovico's granddaughter Mariarosa Rizzi (born in 1930) keeps a few memorabilia and a photo album in Trieste.

In light of this situation, this publication by the Historical Research Center is a great gesture of recovery of that memory that in Istria is often lame, so much so that, as underlined by Knez, the biographies of many important figures for the history of Istria are missing, especially those of the Italian side. We recall that the Historical Research Center of Rovinj is an institution of the Italian Union, the joint organization of Italians in Croatia and Slovenia, which yesterday evening in Pula was represented by the president of the Executive Board Marin Corva.

Considering that the book was published within the Collana degli Atti del CRS, the director of the series Paola Delton presented this series born in 1977 with the reprint of the “Storia documentata di Rovigno” by Bernardo Benussi and that in 45 years has published 50 titles, to which 9 extra series are added. Of capital importance was the editorial effort made in 2006 when, edited by Egidio Ivetić, the Italian version of the important historiographical work “L'Istria nel tempo” was published, which in 2009 and, respectively, in 2011, was also published in Croatian and Slovenian.

Tamara Brussich, president of the Pula CI, hosted the event. The evening opened with a performance of the " Hymn to Istria " by the "Lino Mariani" mixed choir, conducted by maestro Ronald Braus. Braus also closed the cultural event with the " Hymn of the Istrian Rowers" composed by Antonio Smareglia, another great Polesano native.