Today, February 5, 2022, marks the centenary of the death of Luigi Ziliotto (Zadar, February 8, 1863-Zadar, February 5, 1922), five-time podestà (mayor) of Zadar. Appointed senator of the Kingdom of Italy on November 12, 1921, in December of the same year he gave a passionate speech in the Senate Chamber against the ratification of the Treaty of Rapallo, which handed over all of Dalmatia, with the exception of Zadar, to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Ziliotto, whose bust, together with that of the other Dalmatian senator of the Kingdom, Roberto Ghiglianovich, is placed next to the entrance to the Senate Chamber in Rome, was an illustrious exponent of Dalmatian irredentist nationalism, of liberal origin, not to be confused with fascist nationalism. In fact, Ziliotto died before the March on Rome, when Luigi Facta was Prime Minister, and his last victorious electoral campaign in Zara, in January 1922, saw him pitted against a candidate expressed by the fascists.
Ziliotto's generation of Italian Dalmatians had experienced the drama of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's policy aimed at favoring the Slavs, in particular after the war of 1866 and the annexation of Veneto and part of Friuli to Italy: in 1861 the 84 Dalmatian municipalities were administered by Italian mayors, while the Austrian census of 1910 certified that the Italians had been reduced to 3 percent of the population, concentrated essentially in Zara, the only administration still controlled by the Italians. In that context moved those who aspired to the autonomy of Dalmatia like Giovanni Franceschi (Ivan Perinović 1810-1862) with his economic literary weekly La Dalmazia, the irredentists like Giulio Solitro from Split who wrote: "... today we are Austrians, but of our most ardent memories and of our holiest, greatest loves, of our joys, of our mourning, of our whole soul, we are Italians, Italians", and the pro-Croatians like Count Alfonso De Borelli, who was decidedly on the side of the Croatian nationalists.
Ziliotto was born and raised in that climate and at the beginning of his speech to the Senate he recalled that “a part of the most beautiful dream of my life, the union of my hometown with the great mother” had become reality. But his gaze went beyond that because, he explained to the senators: “…among that archipelago of islands that goes from Istria to Lagosta there is an island much larger than all of them and in the eastern parts it is, from the land that is behind it, separated, more than it could be by any sea, by an uninterrupted chain of mountains. That island is Dalmatia”, where – Ziliotto continued – “the documents, the customs, the law, all the public and private institutions are those of Italy”. In reality that world had by now disappeared and the nationalist furies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen the Croats of Dalmatia deny linguistic and scholastic rights... to the small Italian minority, always with the exception of Zara, while in Istria the Italian majority in the coastal towns repaid the Croatian minority with the same bad coin.
I spoke about this anniversary of the death with Croatian friends from Zadar who tell me that it is not yet time to remember in his hometown the many times mayor and senator of the Kingdom, Luigi Ziliotto. I believe instead that in Zadar and Rijeka, Croatian and European cities, in Dalmatia, a Croatian and European region, in Istria, a Slovenian, Croatian and European region, wherever today there is still more or less a proud indigenous Italian minority, we must dutifully distinguish the criminals who massacred their own people in the name of ideologies such as Nazism and Communism, condemned by history (and by the European Parliament), from people like Luigi Ziliotto and similar Italian and Croatian patriots, enraptured by a dream of love and certainly not guilty if that dream then turned into a nightmare.

Charles Amedeo Giovanardi
irre

Source: The Voice of the People – 05/02/2022