Italy gave various reasons for occupying and annexing the Littoral: historical, national, strategic, cultural and legal. On this page we quote them in the words of their advocates and show, for each one, what the sources say about it. We also rely on Italian witnesses who saw the same things we did.
“We feel ourselves in opposition to the Italian state, which annexed us against our will, not to the Italian people.”
Atti parlamentari, Camera dei deputati, leg. XXVI, p. 1171. “These are Italian lands waiting to be redeemed”
From the mid-19th century irredentism demanded the “redemption” (redenzione) of Italians from Habsburg rule. In this view Trieste, Gorizia and Istria were Italian, and the Slovenes and Croats merely a rural appendage.
The irredentist movement; the Trento-Trieste society; liberal nationalists in Trieste
What the sources say
According to the Austrian census of 1910, the territory of the later Julian March had 466,730 inhabitants whose language of daily use was Slovene or Croatian (50.2%) and 354,908 whose language was Italian (38.2%). Italians predominated in Trieste and the towns of the western Istrian coast; the countryside from the Timavo to Triglav and Snežnik was almost entirely Slovene and Croatian. The national question was, as Milica Kacin-Wohinz writes, “at the same time a question of the relationship between town and country”.
Even the first Italian census of 1921, carried out under occupation, counted 349,206 Slovenes and Croats. By comparing it with election results, the Trieste historian Carlo Schiffrer estimated the real figure at about 428,000. So even by Italian statistics, Italy acquired almost half a population that was not Italian.
2. “The Alps are the natural border”
Italy was to reach its “natural borders”: the Alpine watershed, which according to Victor Emmanuel III's speech from the throne in 1921 Dante had “prophetically fixed”, and the borders that, in Mazzini's words, had been drawn by “the finger of God”.
King Victor Emmanuel III, 11 June 1921; Enrico De Nicola, 14 June 1921
What the sources say
The border of the 1915 Treaty of London was not a national but a strategic one: it reached the watershed between the Black Sea and the Adriatic and Mount Snežnik, and took about a quarter of its population from the Slovene nation. When Italy occupied the territory in November 1918, it did not respect even the watershed: it took Tarvisio for the zinc and lead mines of the Predil, Idrija for its mercury mine and the Pivka basin up to Logatec, which drains into the Sava and therefore lies beyond the “natural” border.
In November 1920 Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza openly admitted in parliament that if Italy wanted to secure strategic borders, it had to take “a few hundred thousand Yugoslavs” into the state. It was not about nature; it was about military advantage.
3. “The Slovenes are newcomers settled by Austria”
In 1918 Giorgio Pitacco claimed that the Slovenes and Croats of the Julian March were merely “nuclei” (nuclei) infiltrated by Austria, and that their assimilation would be “very simple and quick”. Ruggero Timeus considered them “peoples without history”. In June 1921 Deputy Girardini told parliament that the Slovenes of the Gorizia region were “newcomers in an Italian land”.
Associazione politica fra gli Italiani irredenti; nationalist writers; Deputy Girardini
What the sources say
Slovenes had lived on the Karst, in the Soča valley and in the hinterland of Trieste since the early Middle Ages. In the second half of the 19th century they built a dense network of reading rooms, savings banks and associations; in Trieste they had the political society Edinost (from 1874), the daily Edinost and the Narodni dom (1904). When the Italian army entered the region in autumn 1918, the author observes, it did not occupy an empty land but “a living national organism with a ramified self-governing structure”.
How “simple” assimilation would be was shown by the first elections. In May 1921, despite fascist violence, the Yugoslav national party won four of the five seats in the Gorizia constituency, and across the whole Julian March exactly as many votes (34%) as the Italian national bloc.
4. “The people wanted Italy”
In April 1920 the Trieste “Adriatic mission” handed the Allies in San Remo a memorandum calling for the Treaty of London to be carried out, presented as the expression of the population's will, a kind of plebiscite.
Action committee of the Italian parties in Trieste (chairman Giorgio Pitacco)
What the sources say
The memorandum was signed by 59 of the 650 municipalities of the Julian March, and they were run by civil commissioners appointed by the occupying authorities. When Slovenes collected signatures for union with Yugoslavia in November 1918, 84,985 of the 96,772 inhabitants of 81 municipalities signed in the Gorizia region alone. By April 1919, 289 municipalities had signed protests against the occupation.
It was the Slovenes who demanded a plebiscite: the Edinost delegation asked for one in writing from the conference chairman Nitti on 26 April 1920. Italy refused it, just as it refused the inter-Allied occupation the Slovenes had asked for. Prime Minister Orlando warned the Allies that Italy would regard such a step as a “hostile” act.
5. “We come as liberators”
In November 1918 Governor Petitti promised the Slovenes in a proclamation in Slovene: “Italy, the great state of freedom, gives you the same civil rights as all its citizens, gives you schools in your language, more than Austria gave you.”
Proclamation of the Governor of the Julian March, November 1918
What the sources say
In the school year 1918/19 about 5,000 children from Trieste and its surroundings had no lessons, because the authorities did not allow Slovene schools in the city. The Gorizia grammar school, teacher-training college and commercial school were closed. Of 250 Croatian primary schools in Istria, 123 were open in January 1920. Between 1918 and 1920, by various estimates, from 500 to more than a thousand civilians were interned, among them Bishop Anton Mahnič.
The Italian socialist deputy Giovanni Cosattini, too, told parliament in August 1920: “In the Slav districts there is no longer law, nor justice, nor freedom; there is only the arbitrary will of any garrison commander or municipal commissioner.”
6. “Occupation is the victor's right”
On 3 November 1918 General Petitti took over Trieste “in the name of the King of Italy”; the occupation rested on the “right of conquest” (diritto di conquista). General Badoglio explained that the word “provisionally” in the armistice meant almost the same as annexation.
General Staff of the Italian army, confidential circular of 29 November 1918
What the sources say
The armistice of Villa Giusti provided that the evacuated territory would be occupied by the forces of the Allies and the United States and administered by local authorities under their control. The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs had been proclaimed on 29 October, before the armistice, and was not at war with Italy. On 31 October 1918 Foreign Minister Sonnino promised the American envoy House that occupied Austro-Hungarian territory would have the same status as occupied German territory. None of this was respected. The border was finally settled only by the Treaty of Rapallo in November 1920.
7. “Italy needs no written guarantees for minorities”
When the Treaty of Rapallo was ratified, Sforza assured parliament that the new citizens would be content, “since they belong to a great state which, with its unique civilisation, will jealously protect their local life”. Giolitti added that Italy had always recognised the rights of foreigners “so generously”.
Carlo Sforza and Giovanni Giolitti in the Chamber of Deputies, November 1920
What the sources say
In Article VII the Treaty of Rapallo guaranteed the Italian minority in Dalmatia language and economic rights and the right of option; for half a million Slovenes and Croats in Italy it contained nothing. For that very reason the socialist deputies abstained from ratification. What the verbal assurances were worth was shown by the following decade: Gentile's school reform of 1923 abolished teaching in Slovene, in 1925 Slovene was banned in the courts, from 1927 surnames were Italianised, and by 1928 all Slovene associations had been dissolved.
Italian voices against
Not all Italians thought alike. The democratic interventionists Leonida Bissolati and Gaetano Salvemini granted Yugoslavia Dalmatia and the hinterland east of what later became the Wilson line. In 1918 the Trieste socialists led by Valentino Pittoni proposed an independent Trieste territory in which Slovenes would be fellow citizens with equal rights. At its Bologna congress in October 1919 the Socialist Party protested against the forcible annexation of territories with a non-Italian population and demanded self-determination.
When Salvemini learned in February 1920 what was happening in the occupied territory, he was outraged: “In Rome, in the government and in parliament, nobody knows about all this! It is the cursed policy of the nationalists there, which is the greatest misfortune for Italy.”
In 2000 historians of both nations unanimously adopted a joint report on relations from 1880 to 1956. One of their co-chairs was Milica Kacin-Wohinz, author of the book on which this page is based. Italian politics never officially endorsed it.
Slovene-Italian Relations 1880–1956. Report of the Slovene-Italian Historical and Cultural CommissionSources
- Kacin-Wohinz, M. (1972): Primorski Slovenci pod italijansko zasedbo 1918–1921, pp. 13–43, 75–95, 136–141, 266–270, 293–295, 373–391.
- Atti parlamentari, Camera dei deputati, legislatura XXVI, tornata del 21 giugno 1921, pp. 117–120.
- Discorso della Corona, 11 giugno 1921. Atti parlamentari, Senato del Regno, leg. XXVI, pp. 5–7.
- Schiffrer, C.: Sguardo storico sui rapporti fra italiani e slavi nella Venezia Giulia. Trieste.
- Salvemini, G. (1925): Dal patto di Londra alla pace di Roma. Turin.