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donationsEditorial Introduction. When Italian troops landed in Trieste in November 1918, they called it a liberation. In truth, it was a military occupation under armistice — the replacement of one empire with another. Trieste, a cosmopolitan port where five languages mingled before breakfast, was forced into a nationalist mold that shattered its essence. What followed was not the rebirth of a free city, but its slow mutilation — cultural, political, and economic — later perfected by Fascism and echoed in 1954 under NATO oversight.
Landing and Military Authority
3 November 1918. The torpedo-boat Audace docks at Molo San Carlo. Bersaglieri cyclists disembark, led by General Carlo Petitti di Roreto, newly appointed military governor. That same day, he proclaims: “Trieste is free, Italian forever.” Then comes the revealing clause: “Any disorder shall be suppressed.”
No annexation here — an occupation under armistice. Trieste is handed from Austria to Italy like spoils of war, a trophy for the peace table. Italy did not “liberate” Trieste; it conquered it as one seizes a prize.
Many of the soldiers, barely literate, found themselves ruling one of the most educated cities in Europe — a place of quadrilingual schools (Italian, German, Slovene, Hungarian) and merchants fluent in five tongues before breakfast. To Triestines, it felt like an invasion by grey-green aliens convinced they brought civilization to those who already practiced it.
Petitti’s Proclamation: Occupation in Ink and Paper
On 5 November 1918, two days after landing, Petitti signed the first decree of the Royal Governorship of Trieste — a document still preserved in the State Archives. It orders that all private arms of any kind be surrendered within 24 hours, under penalty of arrest and trial by court-martial. A curfew is set for 22:00; public venues must close by 22:30.
This is not the voice of a liberator; it is the tone of an occupier — colonial in spirit, more Khartoum than continental Europe.
A Severance from a World
That day, as Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris later wrote, “marked Trieste’s detachment from a world that had belonged to it for centuries” — the Danubian, multi-ethnic world that made it flourish. Konrad von Hohenlohe had called Trieste “a nation-less city, removed from the quarrels of nations, a unifying symbol of the Danube basin.” Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse lamented the Italian entry: “The sensation of a lost war has never been so painful as today. After this event, the world war has lost for us even its final meaning.”
It was not only a military defeat; it was the collapse of a centuries-old balance. Trieste was losing not just an empire, but its raison d’être — a bridge, not a border.
From Empire to Province
Between 3 and 9 November, the Royal Army occupied what Rome baptized “Venezia Giulia” — a term coined in 1863 by glottologist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, until then familiar to a handful of irredentists: propaganda draped as geography. Petitti ruled with full civil and military powers. No local representation, no parliament, no autonomy — only decrees, censorship, and fear. The proclaimed freedom took the form of martial law.
Bewildered by Trieste’s complexity, the new masters behaved like frightened colonials: double-headed Habsburg eagles were torn from palaces, pediments, monuments, even public furnishings. Systematic vandalism posed as “national purification” — the erasure of a civilization’s stone memory.
A City without Bread
The port idled, railways stalled, the city starved. The military government severed links with Vienna and Ljubljana: merchant Trieste became captive Trieste. People whispered a dangerous truth: “We lived better under Austria.” Heresy — but not a lie.
Meanwhile, the city was stripped of iron as well as bread. A technical review noted that “after the Italian occupation of 1919, the best cranes of the port were dismantled and sent to Genoa.” Those were no ordinary cranes: they belonged to the ingenious Habsburg hydrodynamic system that moved the entire port without electricity. Their removal crippled operations — punishment rather than governance. The “liberating army” showed itself for what it was: a band of foreign looters, stripping the city of its mind and mechanical limbs. Trieste, once the Empire’s laboratory, became a ransacked workshop.
Dissolved Councils, Silenced Voices
On 23 November 1918, Petitti dissolved the Slovene-Croat-Serb National Council, the first democratic initiative born in this multilingual city. For Rome, it was a contaminant. From now on: one language, one flag, one command.
Immediate Symbolic Italianisation
“Piazza Grande” became “Piazza Unità d’Italia.” Names changed; hunger did not. Toponyms turned into propaganda. Habsburg words were erased like a thought-crime. Thus began the re-education of the Empire’s most cosmopolitan city.
Purges and the Coming of Fascism
Austro-Hungarian officials were expelled, Slovene and Croat clerks dismissed. Italians from the Kingdom took their places. Trieste changed masters, not administrators — the prelude to the cultural ethnic cleansing Fascism would perfect.
After the Gentile school reform (1923), education became a tool of forced assimilation: Slavic languages banned, local schools closed, libraries purged. Names, surnames, and place-names were Italianised; newspapers and cooperatives suppressed; “allogene” priests persecuted. Thousands of Slovene and Croat families were dispossessed — lands, homes, bank accounts, businesses — redistributed to officials and settlers from southern Italy under the Fascist Office for Venezia Giulia. It was ethnic cleansing with stamps instead of rifles — draining the land of its memory and refilling it with a counterfeit identity.
History Repeats: 1954 and the New Colonialism
Decades later the pattern returned. In October 1954, after the London Memorandum transferred Zone A’s administration from the Allied Military Government to Italy, Giovanni Palamara — a Treasury official — became the first Italian governor. One of his first directives: for every Triestine removed from public service, five clerks must arrive from the peninsula. Colonial arithmetic, copied from 1918: more regnicoli, fewer Triestines. Uniforms changed; the principle remained.
The City of Two Souls
“Trieste cannot stifle its dual soul,” wrote Ara and Magris, “for in doing so it would perish.” In 1918, a one-soul Trieste was demanded — and killed. In striving to make it purely Italian, its essence was stripped away. What remained was a maimed city: Habsburg universalism dead, nothing in its place.
Return of the Regnicoli
Tens of thousands of Italians from the Kingdom flowed in: officials, teachers, police, priests. Locals were sidelined as “Austrian-leaning”. The fracture widened between Rome’s language and the port’s dialect. No fusion; only conquest.
Repression and Hunger
Between February and March 1919, railway and dockworkers’ strikes were crushed by cavalry — the same troops who had entered the city to cold silence months earlier. No ovations then, none later. Trieste watched its new masters in wary quiet, as one regards those who intend to overstay. Military tribunals condemned the strike leaders. Patriotism ended. Order reigned.
A Mayor on a Leash
Lawyer Alfonso Valerio, once an Austro-Hungarian podestà, became “Italian mayor,” deciding little: every act required the Governor’s approval. A civic puppet under military strings — the perfect emblem of the “freedom” bestowed.
Two Occupations, One Illusion
Trieste endured two “liberations” and found no freedom. In 1918 the Bersaglieri arrived; in 1954 they returned. The first extinguished the city’s dual soul; the second sealed what remained under NATO glass. In 1918 the dream of homeland dissolved into hunger and censorship. In 1954 the dream of Italy shrank into a protectorate managed by U.S. and Western military interests, negotiated with Yugoslav diplomacy. In both cases Trieste was treated as an object, not a subject.
The irredentists — “never was greater disappointment” — expected a mother and found a stepmother. Those who had lived the Empire had at least been allowed to work and create. As Magris warned, “Trieste perishes each time it tries to strangle one of its two souls.” In 1918 Italy strangled it by occupation; in 1954 American diplomacy bartered it — sacrificed to a balance that never belonged to it. The result is plain: a city that belongs to no one, because it could live only as belonging to all.
Epilogue: The City without Masters
As Karl Marx observed in 1857: “Trieste shared the same privilege as the United States of having no past. Formed by a motley band of merchant-adventurers — Italian, German, English, French, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish — it was not chained by traditions.” (The Maritime Commerce of Austria, 1857)
A definition still true: Trieste found freedom precisely in having no masters. Since then, everyone has tried to give it one — and every one, without exception, has betrayed it.
About the Author
Alessandro Gombač was the founder and first president of the Free Trieste Movement, which in two years surpassed the combined membership of all Italian national parties in the city. He has since continued to advocate Trieste’s special legal status before international institutions, including the United Nations and the European Parliament.