Trieste Does Not Belong

by Alessandro Gombač

Trieste is not a city like any other—nor is it Italy’s to claim. Born of treaties and empire, commerce and contradiction, it stands at the crossroads of East and West, law and silence. This article exposes the legal and geopolitical lie that keeps Trieste in limbo.

“We felt like foreigners in a strange land, as if by crossing the Isonzo we had passed an invisible but tangible frontier. We had crossed from Italy into what would become a ‘no-man’s land’ between Western and Eastern Europe.”
— Geoffrey Cox, The Race for Trieste (1945)

Just crossing the Isonzo is enough to feel it: something changes.
The British soldiers sensed it in 1945.
And anyone who looks at Trieste for what it truly is can still feel it today.

Trieste is not an Italian city in the way Milan or Bologna are.
It never has been.
Trieste is an anomaly. And, like all anomalies, it provokes fear. That’s why it gets erased.

 

The problem is that Trieste does not belong

Not to a fixed identity, not to a nation, not to a convenient narrative.
Not even to those who live there today and pretend everything is normal.

Trieste has always been a project imposed from the outside—
and an open wound for anyone trying to box it in.

Treaties, law, and the convenient amnesia

The Treaty of Peace signed on February 10, 1947 between defeated Italy and the victorious Allied Powers is a treaty in force, born of a war that killed 60 million people.
Full stop.

Its Article 21 established the Free Territory of Trieste, with its own legal order, an international Free Port (Annex VIII), and a structure of neutrality guaranteed by the United Nations.

Rome, for its part, was entrusted only with civil administration—never sovereignty.
Yet it acted from the start as if the issue were closed.
As if paper were just paper.
As if the signatures in Paris were ink that had long evaporated.

That’s how rights are erased: through practice, through silence, through schools that don’t teach and registries that absorb.

Marx and the city without a past

“Venice was a city of nostalgic reminiscences; Trieste shared the same privilege as the United States: it had no past. Shaped by a colorful horde of merchant-adventurers—Italians, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews—it was not bound by tradition.”
— Karl Marx, The Maritime Commerce of Austria, 1857

Marx said it—and those who read him carefully know:
Trieste is not a child of history, but of commerce and emporiality.
Not of national culture, but of mixing.
It was a successful 19th-century experiment in globalism, long before the term “globalization” was coined.

And today? That DNA is once again in demand.

Engels, Churchill, and the geopolitical fault line

“Russia’s natural border runs from Danzig to Trieste.” — Friedrich Engels, 1855

“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent, from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” — Winston Churchill, March 5, 1946

Even the great powers understood it:
Trieste is where empires intersect.

In 1945, Churchill named it as the southern end of the new Cold War.
Because that’s where the West ends—and something else begins.
And that hasn’t changed.

New Cold War, same ghosts

History repeats itself—with containers and satellites, for now.

Today:

• The Chinese want Trieste as the western terminal of their Belt and Road Initiative. They’ve got eyes on it, money ready, and a strategy in place.

• The Americans respond with the Three Seas Initiative, their Adriatic-Balkan sphere of influence. For Washington, Trieste matters only as a military port. It’s under NATO control since December 1954—in direct violation of the demilitarized international status defined by the Peace Treaty.

  

  Hungarian Terminal ex Aquila area operating under Annex VIII regime “Trieste is the port of Hungary”. The status of the Free Port of Trieste is for the benefit not only of all the signatories of the Peace Treaty, but for all the States of Central Europe.” From the expertise Grant & Verdirame – 2014

   

  Meanwhile, Hungary—China’s key partner within the European Union—has secured 3.5 hectares of the former Aquila refinery area, in the Muggia valley and adjacent to the industrial free port zone, bluntly declaring that “Trieste is Hungary’s port.” A statement that speaks louder than a thousand forgotten treaties tucked away in drawers. In December 2022, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó signed an agreement granting Hungary rights over this strategic area for 60 years, in exchange for a € 200 million investment. The terminal will be used by Hungarian companies for exports, with operations expected to begin in 2026. In 2025, Deputy Minister Levente Magyar returned to Trieste and called its inauguration a “historic event” that “will bring Hungary back to the Mediterranean one hundred years after the First World War.”

And in between? In between, there’s us.

Or rather: there’s Trieste.

Voiceless, powerless, with a legality trampled by all—friends, allies, and competitors alike.

Italy and the Isonzo

There’s a recurring phenomenon:
when Italians cross the Isonzo from west to east, they become nationalists.
It’s almost a defense mechanism.

They sense they’ve left their familiar world—that homogeneous fabric stretching from Milan to Palermo—and they cling to the tricolour like a drunk grabs the nearest rail in a bar, to keep from falling.

They don’t understand. And when people don’t understand, they impose.

Rome has treated Trieste like an awkward colony—an anomaly to be absorbed through repression, omission, folklore, and the kind of cultural sovereignty that seeps in through newspapers, schools, and ID cards.

But it doesn’t work.
Because Trieste resists reduction.

Conclusion: Trieste remains an unresolved issue

International law is not optional.
The 1947 Peace Treaty is still valid.
The international Free Port is violated every day by Italian laws that should not apply there.

The freedom of access for all flags (Article 5, Annex VIII) has been trampled with EU sanctions against Russia—even there—in violation of the current international regime.

The problem is, no one says it.
Or rather, some have been saying it for years—
only to be ignored, isolated, ridiculed.

And yet—as in every moment when history pretends to be over—
truth breaks through.

Trieste does not belong.
And we don’t say it out of nostalgia,
but out of law. Out of geography. Out of history.

Because that’s how it is—whether people like it or not.