During a long, unnaturally mild autumn, a severed, semi-decomposed head is discovered by a sheepdog on the eastern slopes of Mount Učka, overlooking the city of Fiume, now Rijeka, Croatia. The decapitated body lies at the mouth of a foiba, one of the karst caves infamous for summary executions after World War II. Soon, another chained corpse emerges from the waters of the Liburnian Riviera, a city steeped in ancient Habsburg glory and now a magnet for mass tourism, sparking the immediate suspicion that the two murders are connected. In the background, the newly formed Croatia of the early 2000s, with the scars of the recent Yugoslav wars still raw, while more remote and forgotten wounds are poised to reactivate like seismic fault lines.

Foiba in Autunno , Ezio Mestrovich's literary testament, feigns the movements of a detective story to soon orchestrate a much more complex and subtle design, where it is essential to "find the right measure: in volumes, shapes, colors, in the material itself." The object of the measure is History, in which embers smolder beneath layers of ash more than half a century deep, suddenly surfacing "like an archaic presence. It seems vanished, then suddenly it resurfaces from who knows what depths. Like events, passions, feelings that are thought to be dispersed and buried by millions of subsequent events. And yet, when you least expect it, you find them close by. Intrusive, robust, disturbing... Like in the past. Perhaps even more so.

Foiba in autumn

The Author – Ezio Mestrovich was born in Rijeka in 1941. A journalist, he served as editor-in-chief of the fortnightly «Panorama», the daily «La Voce del Popolo», and director of the publishing house EDIT in Rijeka. Primarily interested in the problems of coexistence in the heterogeneous social environment in which he lived and worked, he was a constant presence on the cultural scene, not only in Rijeka, in the second half of the twentieth century. An essayist and man of letters, he participated in social and cultural initiatives and was particularly attentive to the affairs of the Italian minority in Istria and Rijeka, a commitment rewarded by the Golden Pen of the Order of Journalists of Croatia and the Istria Nobilissima Award for his complete works in journalism. He died in Rijeka in 2003. By the same author, in the Ronzani catalogue, is also A fiume, un'estate (2022).

Ezio Mestrovich, Foiba in Autumn , Ronzani, Dueville (VI) 2026, 292 pp.