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Istrian pinza, a typical Easter dessert
Gabriella Chmet's blog reflects her passion for history in all its forms, serving as the primary showcase for her publications, which have explored, from the perspective of a member of Istria's native Italian community, lesser-known aspects of communist Yugoslavia. These include her autobiography, The Socialist Abyss: Memoirs of a Former Yugoslavian Woman (Trieste, July 2021), and her historical novels, Zagreb Spring (Trieste, July 2022) and The Russian Spy (Trieste, July 2025). But history also encompasses culture and tradition, including in the culinary sphere, so it's from her blog that we take the recipe for a typical Easter dessert in Istria, the...
“Zagreb Spring” Suffocated by Tito and Ignored by the West
In Zagreb in 1971, suspended between Tito's Yugoslavia and a new independence sentiment, two young people meet at university and fall in love. Driven by the desire for freedom and democracy, they follow the wave of student protests and the guidance of reformist politicians who promise change. They are two imaginary characters, two lovers who live the spring of their existence and in a game of mirrors reflect the lives of the real people who animated that movement. The Spring of Zagreb like that of Prague, with the awareness of living in a dictatorship and that yearning for freedom, that drive to want to rebel against any...
Dear friends of the Eastern Adriatic [Paolo Sardos Albertini]
Dear friends and brothers, Italians of Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, Montenegro The National League celebrated 130 years of its history, also remembering you. Because, of this long period that touched three centuries, that went from the era of horse-drawn trams to that of computers, because of these many decades of history a good part was lived also with you, also by you. Thus at the time of the resistance against the Habsburg genocide: the National League was present in your territories to try to stem the will of Franz Joseph to use every means to erase the Italian presence and Slavicize this entire area. Together we lived...
“The Socialist Abyss” by Gabriella Chmet presented in Trieste
Five years after the novel La guerra di Giusto, my new narrative/memoir L'abisso socialista. Memorie di una ex Yugoslava is published by Luglio Editore in Trieste. The most difficult book, the most painful, the story of a life that defines an entire existence. No, I'm not exaggerating, I'm aware of having touched the most delicate chords, of having put my finger in a wound that has never completely healed. The story that spans the second half of the twentieth century and ends in the present day, is the story of Tito's Yugoslavia, of his parable as god-master of a nation built with iron and fire on a purely ideological basis....
Dreaming of freedom
Gabriella Chmet recovers her memories as a teenager growing up in Tito's Yugoslavia, painting a merciless and ironic fresco of a nation that no longer exists and of its god-master. It was certainly not the (alleged) lack of flavors among the yogurt jars, as former Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović once declared, that made life in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia insipid and bitter. The relatives of the thousands of people who disappeared into thin air, the hundreds of thousands of Julian-Dalmatian exiles forced to leave everything to save themselves, the many political persecuted (and interned), or how many escaped... know something about it.
