Thus the "communist dream" on which the First Republic was born was shattered. And to try to quietly close the matter, the government of the time decided to disperse the exiles throughout Italy. Historical memory, identity, community: nothing seemed destined to survive those years of fratricidal strife. But in Rome , among the abandoned buildings of a former workers' village, something unexpected happened.

Professor Giovanni Stelli , an exile from Fiume and president of the Society of Fiume Studies at Via Cippico 10, tells us about the origins and uniqueness of Rome's Giuliano-Dalmata neighborhood , where every brick recalls the history of the eastern border. "It's the only neighborhood for exiles built after the war; the Italian government was strongly opposed to concentrating refugees to prevent outbreaks of irredentism and normalize the situation." Thus began the dismemberment of the exile community, scattered across abandoned barracks or internment camps used during the First and Second World Wars. Ferruccio Conte , an exile from Dignano D'Istria and a longtime resident of the neighborhood, is one of those children denied water at the Bologna train station. He traveled on that infernal convoy, nicknamed "the fascists' train," to reach the Latina refugee camp. Today he uses just one word to describe the years spent there: "Terrible." Tired of that life, some packed up and headed to the capital, taking shelter in the abandoned housing left by workers on the Universal Exposition in Rome (which later gave rise to the EUR district). "Here in Rome," Professor Stelli continues, "there were some shacks in ruins; the Julian-Dalmatians occupied them, and then, with the establishment of the Opera Refugee Agency, the neighborhood developed more or less as we see it today."

One of the first to arrive was Romano Sablitch , born in 1924, with a life full of experiences to share. An Italian from Fiume and a former naval officer, he was interned in a German labor camp after the armistice. He was in Berlin, and along with other prisoners, he cleared the streets of rubble left by the passing of star-spangled bombers. After the fall of the city, he returned home to find it occupied by Tito's troops. "Tito was there, he was in charge, and people were disappearing. At the time," he explains, "I knew nothing about the foibe and I couldn't explain where all my people had ended up." Romano reached Trieste by land, then Venice, and then Rome. "When I arrived here, there was nothing, I was alone and I slept in a pavilion with a cot." Word spread, and little by little, more and more arrived. "My father," says second-generation exile Pino Gursi , "was born in Capo d'Istria. He came here to reconnect with his old friends, whom the war had separated." Until the state granted the Opera Refugei (Refugee Organization) permission to build houses. Small apartments, nothing like the abandoned properties across the border. The ones the Italian state used to pay its war debts to the Marshal, with scant and inadequate compensation to the former owners. They were still houses, the same ones we see today. Around the first residential areas, streets and squares, churches and schools unfold, and life is finally beginning again. From what was initially just an enclave "of people who spoke the Venetian dialect and were looked upon askance by the Romans," explains Maria Ballarin , a second-generation exile. "Today," she adds, "we are all well integrated into the social fabric, but our plight is still burdened by a strong ideology."

We are in Piazza Giuliani e Dalmati, in the heart of this slice of the city that doesn't even seem like Rome. On our right there is a column on which stands the Roman she-wolf, coming from the arena of Pola, in front of the Church of San Marco surmounted by a marble lion, and on the left the stele on which stand out the names of the unredeemed cities and a tercet by Dante: "You will leave every thing dearly beloved". There, right on our left the glass that protects the monument is broken in several places. "These - explains Maria with a voice broken with emotion - are the symbols of the world we left, unfortunately they are systematically vandalized". After the institution of the Day of Remembrance, underlines the president of the Society of Fiumani Studies, things have improved significantly but, even today, we see manifestations of poor institutional sensitivity". An example? "First of all a premise: even for the foibe as for the Holocaust there are deniers. Well, last year the Speaker of the House Laura Boldrini invited one to Montecitorio”. The third highest office in the State, in reality, had withdrawn from the dispute, but under the aegis of Sel the event was held anyway. Without going too far back in memory, today in Orvieto a conference is being held that aims to counter the “mythology” of the foibe. And the municipality is sponsoring.

Source: Il Giornale