A carefree holiday destination for today's tourists, who know little or nothing about Vergarolla, Pula and its sea were a place of joyful encounter even on that distant Sunday, August 18, 1946, when its inhabitants cherished the dream of regaining a peaceful existence. Suddenly, however, the unpredictable face of a destiny exploded by a cowardly criminal hand materialized, dispersing the scent of a barely caressed tomorrow, erasing dreams, crystallizing pain and feelings, indelible in the future of all those affected by that massacre. The sadness of remembering that tragic day was renewed again this year on the occasion of...

Last Monday, ceremonies commemorating a terrible chapter in Italian history were held: the massacre of defenseless civilians, mostly young people and children, who died on the Vergarolla beach in the Polesine area on August 18, 1946. It was a day of celebration and sport that should have brought a smile and a moment of lightheartedness, amidst anguish and uncertainty about the future of those lands. A piece of memory too long dismissed from the collective imagination, a dull pain, compounded by the lack of recognition of what happened, which for decades further deepened the anguish of the families who lost loved ones in that explosion. A...

The documentary "Vergarolla. The Canceled Massacre," produced by the RAI Friuli Venezia Giulia editorial team, can be streamed on Rai Play: https://www.raiplay.it/video/2025/07/watchfolder-FVG-PROGRAMMI-ITALIANI-VERGAROLLA-1604616--BR--2400mp4-a8d4f1b0-f67a-4390-a83a-ff5e5f574651.html On August 18, 1946, an explosion on Vergarolla beach in Pula, where hundreds of people had gathered to watch a swimming event advertised as a demonstration of Italianness, resulted in the confirmed deaths of 65 people and an unknown number of injuries and missing. The Vergarolla massacre occurred after the war ended in an Italian city that was about to become Yugoslavian, and is...

Pola, August 18, 1946. The massacre in Vergarolla was the largest in terms of civilian casualties since the end of the Second World War. It is the largest massacre to have occurred within the territory of the Italian Republic. Yes, because the city of Pola, although under British military control, was still Italian territory in August 1946. Yet in Italy, this Italian tragedy is never remembered, never mentioned, and never officially commemorated. BACKGROUND: At the end of the Second World War, in June 1945, after a brief but terrible and painful occupation of Pola by the "Titoist" communist partisans, the famous forty...

On Sunday, August 17th, at 9:15 a.m. on Rai 3, among the regional programs of Friuli Venezia Giulia, and again on Wednesday, August 20th at 21:20 p.m. on Rai 3 bis, the documentary VERGAROLLA - the cancelled massacre will be broadcast. On August 18th, 1946, an explosion on the Vergarolla beach in Pula, where hundreds of people had gathered to watch a swimming event advertised as a demonstration of Italianness, resulted in the confirmed deaths of 65 people and an unknown number of injuries and missing. The Vergarolla massacre occurred after the war ended in an Italian city that was about to become Yugoslavian, and was under British administration, and once...

Radio24 is the radio station connected to the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and in the column "Matteo Caccia racconta..." of last October 16th the journalist and theatre actor spoke about the Vergarolla massacre, the first and bloodiest in the history of the Italian Republic. The testimony of the Polesine exile Regina Cimmino took listeners to the beach of Pola on that terrible August 18th 1946 and Caccia subsequently made extensive use of the material found on the website of the Association of Italians of Pola and Istria - Free Municipality of Pola in Exile to reconstruct the historical context and the responsibilities of an attack that caused at least 100 deaths, many of which...

A year after the conference dedicated to Giuseppe Geppino Micheletti, a doctor and hero of the Vergarolla massacre, the Council of the indigenous Italian national minority of the Istrian Region has published a volume with the reports and various interventions: Giuseppe (Geppino) Micheletti, a hero doctor. To commemorate the victims of the Vergarolla massacre. The new president of the minority Council, Ennio Forlani, took care of distributing the book on the occasion of the commemoration of the victims of Vergarolla on August 18 in Pula. "An act due, given the publication of the volume and given the many people present and who perhaps last year were unable to participate in our...

On August 18, 77 years ago, the bloodbath that would later go down in history as the “Vergarolla Massacre” took place. A Sunday on the beach, a sporting Sunday. A few hundred Polesi settled on the seashore to watch the Coppa Scarioni races for what should have been a day of celebration but instead turned into a day of blood. The mines piled up on the beach and in the sea, now considered harmless, so much so that bathers walked past them and placed their things on them, gave rise to a terrifying explosion that transformed the beach into a slaughterhouse. Sixty-four victims were identified, a few more...

Today marks the anniversary of the bloodiest massacre in the history of the Italian Republic, which took place on the beach of Vergarolla, near Pola, on Sunday 18 August 1946. Due to the explosion of a defused mine depot, at least a hundred people were killed (only 64 were identified, the others were literally pulverized) and even more were injured, the most serious of whom Dr. Geppino Micheletti did his utmost to save at the city hospital, even though he knew that his two young children were among the victims. And like them, many other children, women, defenseless civilians who thought they were finding a peaceful day at the seaside. This terrible episode, which took place almost...

August 18, 1946. On that tragic Sunday, two and a half kilometers from the center of Pola, on the Vergarolla beach, while the annual swimming competitions of the Scarioni Cup, organized by the Pietas Julia rowing club, were underway, with a large crowd of people, depth charges and other war remnants that had been deactivated by three teams of bomb disposal experts were detonated using a special trigger. The explosion tore apart children, young people and entire families; of the more than 100 dead, only 64 bodies were recomposed and identified, while the other remains were buried without a name. The main hero of the rescue was the surgeon Dr. Geppino Micheletti,...