In the summer of 1920 two events in Trieste set the course of the next twenty years. In July the fascists burned the Narodni dom, the centre of Slovene life in the city. In September the army broke the workers' barricades at San Giacomo with artillery. First came the “Slav danger”, then the “Bolshevik” one.
“In the flames of the Narodni dom our strength has grown a hundredfold, a thousandfold!”
An atmosphere of fear
In the first half of 1920 the Italian authorities in the Julian March expected a double danger: a socialist revolution and, at the same time, a rising of Slovenes and Croats, perhaps even an attack from Yugoslavia. Carabinieri reported couriers crossing the demarcation line, weapons hidden on the Karst, lorries full of soldiers near Cerkno. General Badoglio warned of “a second Albania”. He meant what was happening to Italy just then across the Adriatic. The Italian army had occupied Vlorë as early as December 1914, and in June 1917 Italy proclaimed a protectorate over Albania. In January 1920 the Albanian Congress of Lushnjë demanded full independence. In June 1920 Albanian insurgents besieged the Italian garrison in Vlorë; in Ancona the bersaglieri mutinied rather than be sent to the Albanian front. Under the Tirana agreement of 2 August 1920 Italy withdrew from Albania, keeping only the island of Sazan. It annexed Albania only in April 1939. Only General Caviglia, commander of the army in the region, concluded that Yugoslavia was in no state to attack: as late as July 1920 the Yugoslav delegation in Paris admitted that it could not resist “even the smallest attack”.
The only serious clash of the whole occupation took place in Prvačina on 5 July 1920, the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Villagers hung Yugoslav flags on the hilltops and unfurled one in the procession. When the carabinieri tried to seize it, the crowd fell on them. The carabinieri fired; four villagers were wounded and three carabinieri beaten. For the Italian authorities this was a “revolt”.
On 10 July the General Civil Commissioner Mosconi issued confidential instructions: the carabinieri were to draw up lists of all “dangerous persons of Yugoslav nationality” and, at the first disturbance, arrest them and take them to Gradisca. Rome stopped the plan. On 17 September Giolitti replied that new internments would show Italy abroad as the oppressor of Slovenes and Croats.
Split, 12 July
The pretext came from far away. In Split two officers from the Italian ship Puglia pulled down a Yugoslav flag. When local people attacked Italian sailors, the sailors fired at the shore and killed a demonstrator; local gendarmes returned fire and killed the ship's commander Tommaso Gulli and the stoker Rossi. An international commission later found that the Italian sailors had caused the incident.
Why did a clash in Dalmatia, 400 kilometres to the south, unleash violence in Trieste? The answer lies in a pattern repeated throughout the year. Nationalists and fascists declared every act of resistance to occupation and Italianisation, however small, to be proof of the “Slav danger”. So it was with a flag in a procession at Prvačina on 5 July, and with the clash in Split, in which no Slovenes from the Julian March took part at all. Every such incident became a pretext for a new wave of violence against Slovenes and Croats.
The state did not stand aside. Mosconi's instructions of 10 July already provided for mass arrests of “dangerous persons of Yugoslav nationality”. On 13 July the army fired into the Narodni dom instead of at the attackers. The commissioner blamed the victims for the fire and reprimanded the Slovene leaders. The fascist movement acted with the tacit support of the authorities, who saw in it “the healthy forces of the nation”.
Trieste, 13 July: the Hotel Balkan burns
The next day the Trieste fascists called a rally in Piazza Unità. During the rally the cook Giovanni Nini, who had nothing to do with either fascism or Yugoslavia, was killed. The speaker Randi told more than a thousand people that Slovenes had killed him. Led by Francesco Giunta, the crowd set off for the Hotel Balkan, as Italians called the Narodni dom.
The Narodni dom, designed by the architect Maks Fabiani in 1904, housed the political society Edinost, cultural associations, the Trieste Savings and Loan Bank and a reading room; Josip Vilfan lived there too. The building was guarded by 410 men: 250 soldiers, 100 royal guards and 60 carabinieri. When hand grenades and shots came from the third floor, Lieutenant Luigi Casciana was fatally hit. The soldiers then fired into the building instead of at the attackers. The demonstrators broke in, doused the rooms with petrol and set them alight.
A guest, Hugo Roblek of Radovljica, tried to escape through a window with his daughter. Both missed the rescue sheet: the father died, the daughter was badly injured. That same evening the attackers wrecked the Adriatic Bank, the Croatian Bank, the Ljubljana Bank, the premises of the Orthodox church, the law offices of Vilfan, Abram, Agneletto and Okretič, the flat of the Yugoslav consul Marković and the Caffè Commercio. The next day the Narodni dom in Pula burned, the printing works of the Croatian paper Pučki prijatelj in Pazin was attacked, and in Rijeka the legionnaires wrecked Croatian institutions.
Francesco Giunta
The attack was led by Francesco Giunta, a Tuscan lawyer sent to Trieste by the fascist leadership in spring 1920 to spread fascism there. The burning of the Narodni dom was a turning point in his career and one of the deeds that paved fascism's way to power. In March 1922 he and the Trieste fascists took part in the coup in the Free State of Rijeka that overthrew Riccardo Zanella's autonomist government. In October 1922 he led the fascists of the Julian March in the March on Rome, by which Mussolini took power. For the fascists the Narodni dom was the most important symbol of the Slovene presence in the city, and so it had to be destroyed.
A hundred years later, on 13 July 2020, Presidents Sergio Mattarella and Borut Pahor signed in Trieste a letter of intent by which Italy undertook to return the building to the Slovene community.
Who threw the bomb?
General Civil Commissioner Mosconi reported to Rome that the fire had been provoked by “fanatical Yugoslavs” who attacked unarmed demonstrators with bombs. Italian nationalist papers wrote of ammunition in the cellar and of conspirators. The Slovene press answered that only women and children had been in the hotel.
The Trieste historian Carlo Schiffrer showed what really happened in his study Fascisti e militari nell'incendio del Balcan. A few years later, when such deeds already counted as heroism, one of the leading Trieste fascists boasted that on the morning of 13 July he had rented a room in the hotel, brought cans of petrol into it and then thrown a bomb and fired from it. A provocateur had to take care not to hit the crowd; a Slovene defending himself would have done the opposite. Gaetano Salvemini wrote to Schiffrer that in his view the attack had been ordered from Rijeka to obstruct negotiations between Italy and Yugoslavia.
The response
Edinost urged its readers to stay calm: the whole Italian nation was not to blame, since honest Italians condemned the deed. Edvard Slavik wrote to the absent Vilfan: “We are scattered, with nowhere to meet … Without you we are too weak.” The republican paper La Libertà called the fire a disgrace for a civilised nation. Commissioner Mosconi, however, reprimanded three Slovene leaders, Slavik, Agneletto and Abram, and threatened them with arrest should the Slovene population resist. In his memoirs he later wrote that with the fire “the healthy forces of the nation became aware of their strength”.
On 22 September 1920 a delegation of Edinost (Vilfan, Slavik, Karel Podgornik and Sima Kurelić) handed Prime Minister Giolitti in Rome memoranda on the fire, war damage, schools and the currency exchange.
The general strike and San Giacomo
After the Narodni dom it was the turn of the workers' institutions. In Trieste the fascists founded their own labour exchange, which supplied strike-breakers to employers. When workers in Monfalcone protested on 27 August against the fascist employment office, an armed clash and a strike followed. By 3 September it had spread across the whole region. The workers' organisations demanded an end to the state of emergency and the military courts, the release of political prisoners and municipal elections.
On 7 September the General Commissioner received a delegation and promised that the government was studying the questions; the strike was called off. But on 8 September the funeral procession of the murdered worker Vincenzo Forgioni ran into fascists at San Giacomo. Three local people and a gendarme were killed in the clash. The next day the workers occupied the suburb and secured it with barricades of overturned carts and dustbins, flying red flags. The workers' leaders persuaded the young men that resistance was pointless, and the barricades stood empty. Even so, on the evening of 10 September the Sassari Brigade shelled them with artillery.
According to official figures, nine people were killed in Trieste in eight days; according to the paper Delo, twelve. 550 people were arrested; of the five hundred locals, more than two thirds were Slovenes. Commissioner Mosconi reported to Rome that the Slovenes had exploited the strike “under the guise of internationalism”. This is where the term slavo-comunismo comes from, which for twenty years served fascism as a label for every recalcitrant Slovene.
“It was not fascism that defeated the revolution; the revolution that never happened gave birth to fascism.”
Sources
- Kacin-Wohinz, M. (1972): Primorski Slovenci pod italijansko zasedbo 1918–1921, pp. 296–347.
- Schiffrer, C.: Fascisti e militari nell'incendio del Balcan. Trieste, rivista politica giuliana.
- Mosconi, A. (1924): I primi anni di governo italiano nella Venezia Giulia. Bologna.