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Abolish titles and honorifics to Tito
Veneto is leading the way in removing the name from toponymy and revoking all state honors from Josip Broz Tito. A state bill was approved on Wednesday by the First Commission of the Regional Council, and will go to the floor for final approval. The first signatory of the text, approved by a majority without dissenting votes, is the president of the Lega-Liga Veneta Intergroup, Alberto Villanova. The proposal calls for amending Law 1188/1927 «Road toponymy and monuments to contemporary figures» and 178/1951 «Establishment of the order of merit of the Italian Republic and regulation of the awarding and use of...
Tito, Stalin and the Trieste Question
The book analyses the events of Trieste after the Second World War. Tito and Stalin had established strategies on this territory and pursued their territorial claims, in an international context that was changing and placed the entire world in front of an ideological division as well as social, territorial and economic. The recognised political capacity and military strength of Moscow and Belgrade had to confront or clash with equally proven competence present in the Western bloc. Trieste and Italy found themselves in the middle of this situation, starting from a position of inferiority due to defeat. Endogenous and exogenous factors...
“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....
Special issue of Dalmatica Magazine dedicated to the horrors of Borovnica
The dossier intended for the Paris conference of 1947 is a sad sample of atrocities "Secret - October 5, 1945 - Conditions of Italian internees in Yugoslavia with particular reference to the Borovnica camp and the military hospital of Skofja Loka both called the death camp". From the title of the first typewritten page, the report of our services that emerges from the past makes your skin crawl. "Shootings for nothing", "torture at the stake", "forced labor", "living skeletons" are the terrible words that are repeated in the testimonies of Italian soldiers captured after the war and who survived Tito's concentration camps. A classified report of horror...
"We must continue to build a shared historical memory"
The Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, spoke at Palazzo Madama at the celebration of the 'Day of Remembrance', in memory of the victims of the foibe, of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus, of the events on the eastern border. Mr. President of the Republic, Honorable President of the Senate, Honorable Vice President of the Chamber, Madam Vice President of the Constitutional Court, Ministers, I would first of all like to thank the representatives of the Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles and of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia, for their words today and for their efforts over all these years. The "Day of Remembrance" requires us to...
Istrian communists said "Titoists worse than fascists"
The publisher Ronzani continues its meritorious work of recovery and dissemination of the autochthonous Italian literature of the Eastern Adriatic. After a trilogy dedicated to Nelida Milani and her perspectives on the life of those "left behind" in Communist Yugoslavia, it is the turn of the poet from Rovinj Ligio Zanini, whose autobiography Martin Muma dwells extensively on the inhuman conditions in which the "Cominformist" Communists ended up in the gulag of Goli Otok (the Bare Island), those who recognized the supreme authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Cominform (coordination body between the Communist parties) even after the Tito/Stalin split in the summer...
Remembrance Day demands respect
We have received and are happy to publish this communication from Dr. Umberto Zuballi (for years President of the Regional Administrative Court of Friuli Venezia Giulia), sent to the editorial staff of Fatto Quotidiano regarding the Montanari issue, but not published. As an old Istrian, I cannot remain silent in the face of the current, sad controversy over the foibe. First of all, it makes no sense to compare or contrast the Day of Remembrance with that of Memory, or even with April 25. They are different moments in our history, which must be shared. As for the Day of Remembrance, the law establishing it was approved by Parliament with a very broad...
The “bill” of September 8 was paid at the eastern borders
September 8 as the day of Italy's redemption in the Second World War. September 8 as the beginning of the Resistance and the fight against Nazi-fascism on a larger scale. The usual ceremonies have insisted on these aspects, but for the Italians of the eastern border this date is well represented by the title of the famous essay by Ernesto Galli Della Loggia «The Death of the Fatherland». A Fatherland that entered into agony in the retreats in Russia and North Africa, in the war of attrition in the Balkans and in the collapse of the fascist regime. A Fatherland idealized and exalted in the unredeemed lands until the moment it materialized in November 1918, presenting itself in the austere clothes...
Mothers in Tito's Gulag
David Grossman tells the tragic story of Panić Nahir (Vera) and her daughter, Tiana Wages (Nina), in the former Yugoslavia Panić Nahir, in the novel Life Plays with Me by David Grossman (Mondadori, translated by Alessandra Shomroni) is simply called Vera. Her daughter Nina, in reality, is Tiana Wages. Eva had asked David Grossman to write her story and that of her daughter. And the Israeli writer had agreed to tell it in turn and reinvent it, in his own way. When the book was written, in February 2019, Eva was no longer there. So her story, well known in the former Yugoslavia, tears away the veil of darkness on Tito's gulags and, in particular,...
Goli Otok, the broken memory
At dawn, Goli Otok is pale. Gray. An anonymous island against which the oily waves of the Kvarner break. Looking at it from the mainland you can't see any kind of vegetation; you can't see either trees or shrubs. From the water emerges only a stretch of livid and sterile rock. In the summer the sun dries everything, in the winter the wind freezes what remains. In the eternal chase between life and death, it is always the latter that wins on Goli Otok. Looking at it, men have begun to call it in many ways: some have called it "bald", others "naked". But the most suitable adjective, perhaps, is "secret". The back of the island, a high cliff...
