Trieste: A Free Territory Buried Under Seventy Years of Lies

“Trieste is a land that belongs to everyone and to no one.”
– Claudio Magris

An Uncomfortable Dossier in Shanghai

In May 2019, while China’s Belt and Road Initiative was seeking reliable endpoints in the heart of Europe, we brought to the One Belt One Road Forum in Shanghai a dossier that few expected. A sober, legally sound — yet explosive — document.

 

It stated plainly: Trieste is not Italy. It is a Free Territory under the protection of the United Nations Security Council, and its Free Port is regulated by an international legal framework still fully in force.

No grandstanding. No diplomatic fluff. Just the raw, uncomfortable truth. The kind of truth that invalidates memoranda, wrecks deals, and shakes development plans built on the shifting sands of legal fiction.

Seventy Years of Institutional Fiction

For over seven decades, Italy’s administration of Trieste has been a masterpiece of institutional deception:
– a government with no legal title,
– a port managed outside international rules,
– a citizenship imposed on people who legally have their own.

==A legal anomaly turned into false normality==, sustained by the silent complicity of European governments and the engineered ignorance of public opinion.

This is no “local issue.” Trieste is a diplomatic time bomb, passed from hand to hand with a fuse that no one dares light.

A Port Emptied of Its Original Purpose

 

Meanwhile, local politicians wasted twenty years planning tourist aquariums and auctioning off port functions like fish at the market.
The Italian state, for its part, cared only about collecting customs revenue and geopolitical dividends, while stripping the port of its founding purpose: to serve as the economic engine of the Free Territory, not a regional outlet for a centralist republic.

Singapore of the Adriatic? Perhaps.
But only if we return to international legality. Without that, every investment becomes a sandcastle — or worse, a legal fraud.

China Listens — in Silence

At the Shanghai Forum, we were listened to in silence — the kind reserved for those who speak dangerous truths with impeccable documentation.

==Our intervention was streamed live across China==: potentially hundreds of thousands heard it.
China made no comment, showed no reaction — but China listens. And when it listens, it records.

A few months later, Andre Wheeler, Australian logistics expert and journalist, summarized it with brutal clarity:

“China doesn’t want to get bogged down in the geopolitical chaos of the FTT.”

An Illegal Occupation Never Recognized

 

That “chaos” has a name: the illegal occupation of the Free Territory of Trieste by Italy since 1954.
No country in the world has ever formally recognized it.
But everyone tolerated it.
==Realpolitik: 3. International law: 0.==

Wheeler put it in black and white again, just days ago in Splash247:
“Trieste’s Chinese dream is shattered.”
And it shattered because the core question —
Who really governs Trieste? —
was erased from every negotiation.

Trieste: An Open Case in International Law

We’ve been saying it for years.
We’ve said it at the United Nations, we’ve written it to treaty signatories.
Trieste is not a closed issue — it’s the unresolved knot that reopens all others.

 

Because here, in this small Adriatic port, the legacy of world wars, the abandoned principles of international law, and the new trade corridors of globalization intersect like railway lines in a forgotten yard.

 Truth as the Foundation for the Future

In 2019, we were heard.
Today, we’re still here — saying the same things.

With fewer illusions, yes —
but with the same stubborn resolve.

“Those with short memories don’t build a future. They build another lie.”
– Giorgio Bocca

 

These are not just facts, they are responsibilities. And I stand by them

– Alessandro Gombač –