20th century[edit]
At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a bustling cosmopolitan city frequented by artists and philosophers such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Sigmund Freud, Zofka Kveder, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto Saba.
The city was the major port on the Austrian Riviera, and perhaps the only real enclave of Mitteleuropa (i.e. Central Europe) south of the Alps. Viennese architecture and coffeehouses dominate the streets of Trieste to this day.
World War I, annexation to Italy and the Fascist era[edit]
See also: Battles of the Isonzo and Julian March
Italy, in return for entering World War I on the side of the Allied Powers, had been promised substantial territorial gains, which included the former Austrian Littoral and western Inner Carniola. Italy therefore annexed the city of Trieste at the end of the war, in accordance with the provisions of the 1915 Treaty of London and the Italian-Yugoslav 1920 Treaty of Rapallo. While only a few hundred Italians remained in the newly established South Slavic [i] state,
a population of half a million Slavs,[15] including the annexed Slovenes, were cut off from the remaining three-quarters of total Slovene population at the time and were subjected to forced Italianization. T
rieste had a large Italian majority, but it had more ethnic Slovene inhabitants than even Slovenia's capital of Ljubljana at the end of 19th century.
The Italian lower middle class—who felt most threatened by the city's Slovene middle class—sought to make Trieste a città italianissima, committing a series of attacks led by Black Shirts against Slovene-owned shops, libraries, and lawyers' offices, and even the Trieste National Hall, a central building to the Slovene community.[16] By the mid-1930s several thousand Slovenes, especially members of the middle class and the intelligentsia from Trieste, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or to South America. Among the notable Slovene émigrés from Trieste were the author Vladimir Bartol, the legal theorist Boris Furlan and the Argentine architect Viktor Sulčič. The political leadership of the around 70,000 émigrés from the Julian March in Yugoslavia was mostly composed of Trieste Slovenes: Lavo Čermelj, Josip Vilfan and Ivan Marija Čok. In 1926, claiming that it was restoring surnames to their original Italian form, the Italian government announced the Italianization of German, Slovene and Croatian surnames.[17][18] In the Province of Trieste alone, 3.000 surnames were modified and 60.000 people had their surnames amended to an Italian-sounding form.[19] The psychological trauma, experienced by more than 150,000 people,
led to a massive emigration of German and Slavic families from Trieste.[20] Despite the exodus of the Slovene and German speakers, the city's population increased because of the migration of Italians from other parts of Italy. Several thousand ethnic Italians from Dalmatia also moved to Trieste from the newly-created Yugoslavia.[21]
Originally Posted by Mingle
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks