This book has reached its fifth edition in a completely new guise. “Venezia Giulia e Dalmazia: sommario storico”: the volume was published with this title in 1990. It was followed by the English translation (2001), the third bilingual edition with facing texts (2002) and the fourth printed in anastatic form (2011).

The geographical entity of Venezia Giulia, under the Kingdom of Italy, from 1918 to 1947, is formed by the provinces of Gorizia, including the Isonzo Valley and up to Cerkno and Idria, Trieste up to Postumia, Pola, including the islands of Cherso and Lussino and Fiume, from Moschiena up to Villa del Nevoso (with some annexations from 1941). Zadar with a bit of hinterland is an exclave of the Kingdom of Italy from 1918, or rather from the peace treaty of 1920, until the arrival of Tito in 1943, followed by the Nazi occupation and in 1944 the definitive Yugoslav invasion. In the period 1941-1943 Zadar belongs to the Governorate of Dalmatia of the Kingdom of Italy, together with Provinces of Split and Cattaro.

Of great educational impact and marked by a deep patriotic spirit, despite being devoid of figures, the cultural product of Carlo C. Montani is very slim in the First Part, of 94 pages. Here the Author has managed to divide into 18 short chapters about 3000 years of history, of which there is a reference right from the subtitle. The reference is to those unredeemed lands that, in 1863, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, an internationally renowned Italian glottologist, defined for the first time as “Venezia Giulia”. Their borders are generally contained between eastern Friuli (including Bisiacaria, or part of Monfalcone), Trieste, Istria, the islands of Kvarner and the city of Fiume, therefore including the lands located between the Alps and Julian Prealps, Karst, Dinaric Alps and the eastern Upper Adriatic (Gulf of Trieste and Gulf of Fiume). The famous linguist from Gorizia wanted to contrast it with the word Coastline, created by the Austrian authorities in 1849 to identify a more or less coinciding administrative region. Dalmatia includes other unredeemed territories of Zara, Split, Sebenico, Traù and various islands up to the Bocche del Cattaro. All areas with a prevalence, or a large presence of Italian speakers, together with the Slavic world. In the twentieth century these provinces were subject to sudden changes of flag and master, passing through certain dictatorships. They were also subject to the devastation of the two world wars, with all the consequent social and political repercussions.

In Premise it is the same Author who recalls that: "The tragedy of Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia, an essential part of the greatest Italian drama that took place in the 20th century, makes it essential to take stock of the events from which it originated, and their ancient and recent motivations: it is not possible to ignore the cry of pain of about 350 thousand innocent victims, thrown into sinkholes or otherwise massacred during and after the last world conflict, as well as that of the 6 thousand refugees who were forced to abandon without return what they held dear, such as their land, affections, personal possessions and even before that, the tombs of their ancestors, without saying that according to some sources the figures of the Fallen and the Exiles would be significantly higher" (page XNUMX). Even within the confines of correctness, each historian addresses the various issues with his own Worldview and Carlo C. Montani does it too. However, as Prof. Augusto Sinagra points out from the very first bars of the Preface, the Author claims, in a philosophical key, a certain reliability and the need to be faithful to the truth, calling "common attention to the immortal words of Tacitus, the great Latin historian who had affirmed that history cannot be made with feelings - writes Sinagra - from which it must necessarily prescind, because it bases its reliability on the obligation of profess uncorrupted fidelity to the truth. From this follows the imperative of every historian worthy of the name: that of interpreting the facts and their natural human matrices. without love and without hate” (p. 11).

In this regard, a story by Caterina Percoto comes to mind, entitled precisely “Not a syllable beyond the truth”, published in the «Giornale di Trieste» in 1848. In the case of the Risorgimento, described by Percoto, an exponent of rustic literature and a friend of Nicholas Tommaseo, it is a series of retaliatory violence by the Austro-Croats against the Friulian people for the freedom movements from the invader. We are however in the field of anti-Italian pressure on the shores of the upper Adriatic.

In the second part of the volume (167 pp.) we find a personal anthology of historical criticism. Here the same arguments are taken up again, explored in depth with the citations and the relative bibliography. Sometimes these are studies already published on paper, or in website by the same Author. The reference sources for this part are: the Regional Council of Tuscany (Florence); Difesa Adriatica (Rome); L'Esule (Milan); Nuova Antologia (Florence); Riscossa Adriatica (Florence); Journal of International Legal Cooperation (Rome); Studies in honor of Augusto Sinagra (Rome); Vita Nuova (Trieste) and the website www.storico.org (Rome).

In the Third and final part there is a useful Chronology (100 pp.). As the Author points out, the "practice of inserting a chronological list of the salient facts for the purposes of consultation and documentation has become recurrent both in a good part of the most demanding historiographical works, and in many of those of a popular nature, often based on direct testimonies: in the Julian-Dalmatian context this recourse is widespread also in the light of a particularly articulated and complex collective story, especially from the nineteenth century onwards" (p. 265). On the question of the exodus, the foibe and the Day of Remembrance, it is precisely the final Chronology, updated to the facts and places, with a thoughtful wealth of details, that provides an extra boost to the entire volume.

By 1420, a large part of Dalmatia was a possession of Venice. The temporal power of the Patriarchs of Aquileia ended: Udine and Cividale also passed to the Serenissima. Plagues, wars and fluctuating diversified dominions followed. In 1779, Maria Theresa of Austria transferred Fiume to Hungary, confirming its independence from Croatia and recognizing its prerogative of ““Separate body”.

On 17 October 1797, the Treaty of Campoformido was signed. The territories of the Serenissima were ceded to Austria, which in exchange recognised the Cisalpine Republic. Austrian rule began in Friuli and Veneto, while Napoleon's army occupied Trieste. In Perasto (now Montenegro), Venetian since 1420, the last flag of the Republic of Venice was lowered amid general commotion and buried under the main altar of the Cathedral. Captain Giuseppe Viscovich delivered the famous farewell speech that would remain an enduring example of Dalmatian loyalty to the Serenissima, taken up again in the Risorgimento and in Gabriele d'Annunzio's Fiume Enterprise.You with me, me with you” (You with us, we with you).

Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia were subject to a brief Napoleonic domination, first forming part of the Kingdom of Italy of Viceroy Eugene de Beauharnais and then of the Illyrian Provinces of the French Empire (1809-1813). With the Congress of Vienna (1815) everything passed under Austria until the Great War. In 1831 the Statute of "Young Italy" declared the Italianity of Venezia Giulia. The three Italian wars of independence followed (1848, 1859, 1866) and Italian irredentism developed in Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia, with consequent denationalization by the Austrian authorities in favor of the Slavs, in which the Slavic clergy participated, who Slavicized the surnames in the baptismal registers, against the will of parents and godparents with Italian feelings.

In the twentieth century, the two world wars and D'Annunzio's enterprise in Fiume stand out, as in school textbooks, which deal little with Tito's killings in the foibe, and the equally Titoist massacre of Vergarala (August 18, 1946) and the Julian-Dalmatian exodus of 350 people. With the Peace Treaty of February 10, 1947, Yugoslavia annexed Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia. Trieste was part of Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste until 1954, when it returned to Italy, while Zone B, from Capodistria to Cittanova passed under Tito's tanks. The anti-Yugoslav demonstrations in Trieste in the early 50s culminated in the massacre carried out by the police of the Allied Military Government in November 1953, which caused seven victims defined as "the last Fallen of the Italian Risorgimento". The borders between Italy and Yugoslavia were established in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo. From 1991, Tito's state disintegrated into various entities with the resulting wars. It was not possible to report anything else in these lines, except some of the chronological stages of the eastern border, well explored in the volume.

In the vast Bibliography (22 pp.) there is room even for the most recalcitrant deniers, who are also in the process of transformation so as not to completely lose face and public funding, in a jumble of reductionists and justificationists. It is comforting that even recent international literature is orienting its research towards the history neglected in past decades. Consider the book by Ljubinka Toševa Karpovicz, a Croatian scholar, not coincidentally entitled “Rijeka / Fiume (1868-1924)”, or “Autonomije do Države (Fiume 1868-1924: from Autonomy to State) published in 2021 and the work of Dominique Kirchner Reill, an American researcher, who published “The Fiume crisis: life in the wake of the Habsburg Empire”. Just to say that it is difficult to make the word “Fiume” disappear from the titles of history books.

In short, it seems we can say that Carlo C. Montani's book will be a panacea for the reader who is unfamiliar with the history of Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia: it is like a maximized Bignami.

Finally, to conclude with a pertinent quote “ad hoc" borrowed from a famous European writer, and also referable to the Julian, Istrian and Dalmatian people, I would like to say that "in their resigned beauty of sad exiles in this vulgar world, one could read the emotions with the same clarity as in an expressive look" (Marcel Proust, The Mysterious Correspondent, 1896, Italian translation, Garzanti, 2021).

The book reviewed

Charles Caesar Montani, Venezia Giulia – Istria – Dalmatia: Thought and Moral Life. Three Thousand Years of History – Critical Anthology – Chronology, Udine, Aviani & Aviani, 2021, pp. 416. ISBN: 978-88-7772-319-2

Review by Elio Varutti, professor of “Sociology of Memory. Julian Dalmatian Exodus” at the University of the Third Age of Udine. Member of the Executive Committee of the ANVGD of Udine, Headquarters of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia (ANVGD), Provincial Committee of Udine: Via Aquileia, 29 – first floor, c/o ACLI. 33100 Udine. – opening hours: Monday to Friday 9,30-12,30

Source: Elio Varutti – 25/10/2021