The Adriatic, penetrating deeply between the Italian peninsula and the Balkan peninsula and approaching the passes of the Alps that lead to the Danube, forms at its north-eastern end the Gulf of Kvarner, Kvarner or Carnaro (in Croatian Kvarner), of which Rijeka is the most important city and port. In the ninth canto of the Inferno Dante highlights the position of Carnaro as the border of Italy, which he considers a “nation” within the Empire:

As in Arli, where the Rhone stagnates,
as in Pula, near the Carnaro
that Italy closes and its terminus […]

The city of Rijeka stretches along the sea. A karst watercourse – called over the centuries by different names, including Eneo (from the Latin Oeneus), Fiumara (especially in its terminal part), Recina and Rječina (in Croatian) – separated it from the Croatian town of Sušak until 1945.

Rijeka is the point of convergence of three easily accessible roads: to the north-west the road that connects it to Trieste, to the south-west that of the eastern coast of Istria and to the south-east that of the Croatian-Dalmatian coast. Geographically, the port of Rijeka is the outlet of a vast Croatian hinterland, along the Karlovac-Zagreb route, and Hungary, from Karlovac to Budapest. It is a position that corresponds to the opposite western end of Istria that of Trieste, connected to Vienna through the Slovenian and Carinthian-Austrian hinterland.

However, the lack of roads hindered the development of a commercial movement towards this hinterland until the eighteenth century, when the Via Carolina (1728) and the Via Ludovicea (1803) were built. The spread of railways in the second half of the nineteenth century further favored the mercantile development of the city, now permanently connected, by land, to Vienna via Ljubljana and to Budapest via Zagreb, and, on the sea, to the Italian Adriatic coast and Dalmatia up to the Bay of Kotor.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the period of the so-called “Hungarian idyll”, the centuries-old “vocation” of the city was thus fully manifested: to be a point of transit, hinge and synthesis between the continent and the sea, between different languages and cultures, always tenaciously maintaining its prevalent, but not exclusive, linguistic and cultural identity of an Italian character.

The awareness of this identity based on an idea of cultural nation, which had nothing to do with political affiliation, is the foundation of that municipal autonomy tenaciously claimed by the Rijeka people over the centuries: the city always refused to be incorporated into a province or intermediate political entity (such as Croatia) and claimed to depend directly on the central power of that Empire, to which she declared herself “most loyal”.

It was at the beginning of the twentieth century that, faced with the radicalization of the various nationalisms that undermined the structure of Austria-Hungary from within, the people of Rijeka began to see in the annexation to Italy a suitable solution to guarantee their linguistic and cultural identity.

But the Great War and the Peace Conference that followed did not lead to a harmonious coexistence between the various newly formed nations, but to great instability and acute conflicts. After a tormented period marked by D’Annunzio’s Enterprise and then by the failed experiment of the Free State, in 1924 Fiume was annexed to Italy.

The city’s political affiliation to the Italian state lasted only 23 years. Overwhelmed by the tragic events of the Second World War, Rijeka was occupied by Tito’s Yugoslav communist troops in 1945: subjected to harsh repression, within a few years it was emptied of 90% of its inhabitants and became the current Rijeka, a city in which the Italian Fiumani make up about 1.5% of 175,000 inhabitants.

Since the Palaeolithic era, the territory in which the city of Rijeka later arose was inhabited, as evidenced by archaeological excavations. In historical times the name of this territory, which had Istria to the west and the Dalmatian coast to the east as its border, was Liburnia. The Liburnians, belonging to the largest population of the Illyrians, inhabited the eastern shore of the Kvarner and were mainly engaged in piracy.

It was to eradicate piracy in the Adriatic that the Romans waged war on the Illyrians and Histrians starting from the end of the third century BC. In the second half of the second century BC, Istria and Liburnia were already acquired by Rome.

Around the year 129 BC the so-called “Roman wall” was built, a fortified and garrisoned wall, which from Haidovium (today’s Audissina) went along the Karst plateau to near the current Rijeka, intended to separate the Iapidi from the Histri and to constitute a defense from any other invaders. Probably in this same period a fortress was built which became in the Augustan age the military colony of Tarsatica (Tarsactica), the Roman city “ancestor” of Rijeka.

Tarsatica – a name of Celtic origin – stood on the right bank of the Eneus River. As evidenced by numerous archaeological finds, it was a city of some importance, with a forum, public buildings, a temple, a necropolis, baths and perhaps a theater. The only Roman monument still visible in the Old Town today is the so-called Roman Arch, probably a city gate. An evident affinity with Tarsatica has the current name of the locality of Trsat, seat of the famous sanctuary, located however beyond the left bank of the Eneus, where the Roman Tarsatica was located on the right bank of the river; It is not clear how to explain this circumstance.

Little is known about the events of Tarsatica in the imperial period. In the fifth century A.D. Istria and Liburnia were devastated by the raids of the barbarians. The reunification of the Empire by Justinian in 553 brought Tarsatica and Liburnia under Byzantine rule, but the Byzantines were unable to defend the Balkan frontier from the continuous invasions of barbarian populations, Huns, Avars and Slavs.

Between the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century, the Avars arrived in the Balkan peninsula and on the shores of the Adriatic, followed by several tribes of Slavs, progenitors of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgarians. The Croats occupied eastern Istria, Liburnia and Dalmatia, joining and mixing with the Latin population, which generally remained predominant in the coastal cities and islands, and converted to Christianity from the eighth century.

River: Roman arch (actually a Roman city gate)

From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, almost total silence descended on the history of Tarsatica. Liburnia entered the sphere of Frankish rule and was incorporated into the Eastern March of Italy or March of Friuli, which in 828 was divided into four counties: Friuli, Istria, Carniola and Liburnia. According to a very late source, and therefore not very reliable, Tarsatica was destroyed by Charlemagne in 800. Other news has not reached us.

Only in the thirteenth century did the city that had once been Tarsatica emerge from obscurity, but its name changed: it is now designated as Flumen, Land of St. Vitus River, St. Vitus al Fiume, Sankt Veit am Pflaum, Rijeka, the latter translated in Croatian sources as Reka or Rika. San Vito is the name of the patron saint of the city, where already in the thirteenth century there was a church dedicated to the cult of this martyr saint, together with San Modesto and Santa Crescenzia.

From 1028 the city was enfeoffed to the bishop of Pula, who in 1139 ceded it to the counts of Duino, although it remained aggregated in terms of ecclesiastical dependence to the bishopric of Pula until 1787. The name of the Counts of Duino derives from the castle of Duino located at the mouth of the Timavo in the Gulf of Trieste and still existing.

In 1337 the Duinati, short of money due to the continuous wars and court expenses, ceded Rijeka to the Croatian dynasts Frangepani-Frankopan, counts of Krk and vassals of the Hungarian crown, who remained in possession of it for a period of almost thirty years. In 1365 the counts of Veglia returned the city to Hugh VI of Duino.

In the political game that affected the territories of the Upper Adriatic in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the expansionist policy of Venice had become the most important political factor. To oppose the pressure of the Serenissima, the Duinati family established increasingly close relations with the Habsburgs: in 1366 they swore an oath of vassalage to the Habsburgs and supported them militarily in the subsequent war against Venice. The Duinate period of Rijeka lasted 260 years.

In 1399 the male branch of the Duinati became extinct and their possessions, including Fiume, passed to the House of Walsee, to whom the Counts of Duino were related, also closely linked to the Habsburgs. But, unlike the Duinati, the Walsee sought a friendly understanding with Venice, stipulating commercial and maritime agreements with the powerful neighbor.

In 1450 Lambert IV of Walsee was succeeded by his sons Lambert V and Vulgar III, who divided the hereditary possessions. In 1465 Volfango, to whom Fiume and Carsia had gone, designated Frederick III of Habsburg, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, as heir, and to the latter, a few years later, Rambert also alienated his hereditary possessions. With them the Walsee family became extinct and the Habsburgs came into possession of Fiume.

In the Duinate period Rijeka must have achieved a certain prosperity, mainly due to the transit trade between Italy and Carniola, a prosperity documented by the construction of new churches and buildings: in 1315 the Church of San Girolamo and the Augustinian Convent were built, around 1377 the bell tower was raised next to the Cathedral (or church of Santa Maria Assunta dating back perhaps to the eleventh century) and the latter was restored.

Of no less importance was the ancient church of San Vito, the patron saint of the city. In it was kept a wooden Crucifix, which will later be placed in the high altar of the current seventeenth-century church, against which, according to legend, a certain Pietro Lonzarich, in 1227 or 1296, enraged at having lost at the game, threw a stone: a stream of blood then came out of Christ’s side and the earth opened to swallow the sacrilege, leaving out only the guilty hand. This miracle would be at the origin of the construction of the church.

The development of Rijeka intensified in the fifteenth century in the Walsee period. The city, which extended to the east as far as the course of the Eneo, corresponded to the current Old City: it was surrounded by walls resting on the ruins of ancient Tarsatica, in which two gates opened, the “sea gate” in the place where today there is the Civic Tower and the “upper gate” on the opposite side, where today stands the bell tower of San Vito, and was dominated by the Castle erected on the ruins of the Roman fortress. The center was the Piazza del Comune, later called Piazza delle Erbe, where the Loggia stood, where the decisions of the Council and the sentences of the judges were issued.

The population of Rijeka then amounted to about 2000 souls and the city was divided into four districts or districts, whose names coincided with the names of the saints to whom the main churches were dedicated: the districts of Santa Maria (the Cathedral), Santa Barbara, San Vito and San Girolamo.

On an economic level, the fifteenth century marks the beginning of a rise for the city which, albeit with alternating phases, will continue in the following centuries, reaching its peak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As in the Duinate period, so in the Walsee period, iron, grain, timber and hides passed through Fiume from Carniola and Croatia; from Italy olive oil, wines and textiles. Of particular importance were the trades with the ports of the Papal States such as Ancona, while timber took the road to Venice. It should also be noted the presence in Rijeka of two shipyards and some minor industries.

We know that in the fifteenth century the Rijeka Commune had the right to administer itself in a relatively autonomous way, which led to oppose in some cases the claims of the feudal lord, represented in the city by the Captain who resided in the Castle. The most important body of the Municipality was the Council, made up of 16 or 18 notable and wealthy citizens, which elected the two Rector’s Judges, who administered justice together with the Captain. Among the other municipal magistracies, it is worth mentioning the Chancellor who was entrusted with the care of the archives and the Liber civilium, in which the public deeds and private deeds he drew up were recorded. The first of these books by the chancellor dates from 1436 and is written naturally in Latin.

The language spoken in the city by the majority of the people belonged to the Venetian koine (with borrowings from Croatian and Slovenian), as documented by the so-called fish tariff established by the Council of Rijeka on 10 January 1449 and reported in the Liber civilium of the chancellor de Reno, which states, for example,

that each person of what condition he wants to be or whether he wants to sell fish in the land of Fiume over in his distrito must sell the prexi infrascripti zoè the fish of the scales whether it is de livra or more if he has to sell de Easter even to San Michele at one and a half the livra grosso and from S. Michele even to take to s. dui and Lent at two and a half money.

[…] item that the palamides if they must sell for money 1 the livra digging out the entrails […]

The Croatian Chakavo dialect was spoken in the surrounding area, which in the city statute of 1876 was called “Illyrian” for the purposes of public education.

Medieval Rijeka – The Castle (no longer existing), drawing by Riccardo Gigante from the early 900s (Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka in Rome)

Medieval River – Barbicans, drawing by Riccardo Gigante from the early 900s (Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka in Rome)

Medieval Rijeka – Village, drawing by Riccardo Gigante from the early 900s (Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka in Rome)

The old church of San Vito which in the second half of the seventeenth century was replaced by the current one

The Miraculous Crucifix, print by Karletzky

In 1453 the Turks had conquered Constantinople (Byzantium), ending the existence of the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire. In the following years they had penetrated the Balkan peninsula, taking possession of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1463) and then Serbia (1496). In 1526 part of Hungary, including Buda, also fell under the rule of the Turks, who in 1529 came to besiege Vienna, although they were unable to conquer it. Dalmatia and Rijeka were under constant threat, which in fact strengthened its defenses.

The Habsburgs and Venice had a common enemy in the Ottoman Empire, but also opposing interests both in the Adriatic area and in the territory of Gorizia. So in 1508 they entered the war and on May 27 the Venetians occupied Fiume, which remained under the dominion of the Serenissima for just over a year. In May 1509 Venice, defeated at Agnadello during the war of the League of Cambrai, was forced to withdraw from Fiume. In retaliation, the Venetians bombarded Fiume from the sea on 2 October 1509 and sacked it.

Fiume had already been sacked by Venice in 1369 during the Duinate period, but the sacking of 1509 was much more destructive to the point that the Venetian captain Angelo Trevisan wrote in a letter: “Et mai per lui non se dice qua sono Fiume ma qua sono stato Fiume!”. A final devastation of the Kvarner city by Venice would have occurred in 1511, but we know little about it.

Fiume was always hostile to Venice: the Venetians “know from experience that when a Rijeka is born, a capital is born that is an enemy of the Venetian name“, so we read in a letter of 1604 addressed by the Rijeka Council to the Archduke of Austria. To the Habsburgs, on the other hand, the Kvarner city remained “very loyal“, as Emperor Maximilian had written in 1515 in a letter to the Council and the people of “our land of Rijeka“.

Rijeka’s hostility towards Venice was also manifested in the Uskok affair. Those who fled from the Bosnian and Dalmatian hinterland in the face of Turkish pressure were called Uskoks (from the medieval Croatian uskok which means fugitive) on the coast. Settled in Segna, the Uskoks practiced piracy on the sea, at first to the detriment of the Turks and then also of Venice, encouraged more or less openly by the Habsburgs.

Officially, the Rijeka authorities always denied any relationship with the Uskoks, but in reality they had complicity and help in Rijeka: in a map of the city of 1671 there is a “Hosteria where the Scocchi stay” in a place just outside the walls!

In the “War of Gradisca” (1615) between Venice and the Habsburgs, Rijeka once again sided with the Uskoks against Venice, but the Peace of Madrid in 1617, which put an end to the conflict, also marked the end of the Uskoks who were dispersed in the Croatian hinterland. The final treaty was signed on 8 August 1618 in the Castle of Fiume and in the presence of Captain Stefano della Rovere.

At the end of the sixteenth century the population of Rijeka reached 3000 inhabitants. The economic situation of the city suffered a certain deterioration both because of the Habsburgs’ choice to favor Trieste, and because of the Turkish danger.

The weight of the Italian language and culture increased over the course of the century, while the Croatian cultural presence in the city is documented by the presence of a typography in Glagolitic script (1530).

On 29 July 1530, Emperor Ferdinand I of Habsburg ratified the Statute of the City of Rijeka with a sovereign letter patent. Drawn up by the Ferrara Goffredo Confalonieri, the Ferdinand Statute confirmed the centuries-old franchises of Rijeka. The text is in Latin, but there is a contemporary manuscript version written in Italian, preserved in the original in the Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka in Rome.

The Statute is divided into four books: the first deals with the organization of the Municipality, the second with the procedure in civil cases, the third with the procedure in criminal cases and the fourth with the “extraordinary things”, i.e. provisions on various matters.

The already existing system of the Municipality was substantially confirmed.
The representative of the Sovereign, by whom he was appointed, was the Captain: he lived in the Castle together with a small garrison and presided over the Council. The Captain’s lieutenant was the Vicar, appointed by the sovereign until 1574 but then elected by the Council.

The self-governing body of the city was the Major Council, composed of 50 people, which elected a Minor Council of 25 members. The Consiglio Maggiore was a de facto hereditary body which was entered by birth and co-optation and the councillors constituted the city patriciate . The two Rector Judges were the most important magistrates: one was appointed by the Captain within the Minor Council and the other was elected by the Major Council. Among the other magistrates, the Chancellor and the Mayors should be mentioned. The Chancellor, appointed by the Council, had the task of keeping all public and private records and drawing up the minutes of the Council. The Mayors, elected in number three by the Major Council, controlled the work of the magistrates including the Vicar.

The Ferdinandean Statute remained in force until the beginning of the nineteenth century and the people of Fiumani constantly appealed to it against attempts to limit the autonomy of the city, which already in the sixteenth century was, similarly to Trieste, an immediate city, that is, not annexed to any province, but directly dependent on the central power. In fact, while in general the cities of the House of Austria paid homage to the Sovereign united with the province to which they belonged, Rijeka, like Trieste, enjoyed the privilege of paying homage separately. This particular position is also documented by the fact that Fiume in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had its own consuls, appointed by the Council, in various Italian cities, such as Ancona, Barletta, Manfredonia, Civitavecchia and Messina.

The city lost this right in 1748, when, within the framework of the policy of enlightened absolutism, the Mercantile Province of the Littoral was established.

Two pages of the Ferdinand Statute of 1530 in the contemporary Italian version (original kept in the Historical Archives of Rijeka in Rome)

River in a print from 1579

During the seventeenth century there was a progressive decline of the Ottoman Empire, and, connected to this decline, the rebirth of the Kingdom of Hungary.

In 1683 the Turks failed to conquer Vienna for the second time, defeated by the Polish king John Sobieski. As in much of Europe, the Council and the Captain also organized grandiose celebrations in Rijeka for the victory “not heard in centuries against the common Ottoman enemy”, as stated in the minutes of the Council.

On September 2, 1686, Archduke Charles’ imperial army captured Buda, the Hungarian capital that had been subject to Ottoman rule for a century and a half. This victory was also celebrated in Rijeka with religious ceremonies, illuminations, dances and wine distributions. The successes of the imperial army, led from 1697 by Eugene of Savoy, multiplied. Transylvania was reunited with Hungary and Leopold I of Habsburg also became King of Hungary.

The Peace of Carlowitz of 26 January 1699 sanctioned the definitive decline of the Ottoman Empire and at the same time marked the return to the European scene of Hungary, reunified under the scepter of the Habsburgs. With the subsequent Treaty of Passarowitz in July 1718, Austria further expanded its dominions in the Balkan peninsula at the expense of the Turks: Hungary regained all its ancient territory, from the Carpathians to the lower Danube, including Rijeka, intended to serve as a port of call for the products of the Hungarian crown area.

The most important event in the cultural history of Rijeka in the seventeenth century was the opening in 1627 of the Jesuit College, to which the municipality gave an annual subsidy and entrusted the church of St. Roch. The subjects of study were Latin, Greek, history, religion, geography and arithmetic. In the upper classes the language of instruction was Latin and in the lower classes Italian. The pupils came not only from Rijeka, but also from Carniola, Istria, Dalmatia and also from the Austrian provinces, and were of mixed nationality (Italian, Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian). In the last years of the seventeenth century theirs amounted to over 150, a considerable number, if you think that the city had about 3000 inhabitants. The Jesuit College, which had a flourishing life until the suppression of the Order in 1773, was an effective instrument for cultural promotion and the dissemination of the Italian language in the city and even beyond the city walls.

During the century, the city’s autonomy was consolidated against various attempts to limit it made above all by some Captains in opposition to the Council. To confirm this autonomy, on 6 June 1659 Emperor Leopold I granted Rijeka the right to a coat of arms and a banner. Until then, the image of St. Vitus was on the seal of the city, while the coat of arms of 1659 is a double-headed imperial eagle turned to the left with its left paw placed on a vase from which water comes out, and with a card underneath that bears the inscription Indeficienter (inexhaustibly, endlessly, referring to water and the city’s loyalty to the Habsburgs). In memory of the previous seal, the Municipality used the Leopoldine coat of arms, often flanked by Saints Vito and Modesto. From the colors of the coat of arms – carmine red of the field, golden yellow of the frame and ultramarine blue of the background – came the flag of Rijeka, a tricolor with horizontal bands with the colors arranged from top to bottom in the order mentioned.

Inthe second half of the seventeenth century the population of Rijeka exceeded 3000 inhabitants and there was an improvement in the economic situation, as is demonstrated by the fact that some Italian merchants settled in Rijeka with their families, such as the Cremonese Benzoni, the Apulian Bono, the Istrian De Franceschi, the Venetian Orlando.

In the architectural aspect of the city there were important innovations. The great Captain Stefano della Rovere had the castle rebuilt, entrusting its construction to the painter and architect Giovanni Pietro Telesphoro de Pomis from Lodi, who was also active in Trsat. In place of the ancient church of San Vito, the Jesuits had a new large circular church built that resembles that of the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice; the works, under the direction of Francesco Olivieri, lasted from 1638 to 1744. In 1632 the first bridge over the Eneo was built.

Finally, some prominent ecclesiastical personalities should be remembered such as the bishop of Segna and Modrussa Giovanni Agalich (1588-1649), who collaborated with the Franciscan theologian and man of letters, author of important works in Latin, Italian and Croatian, Francesco Glavinich (1585-1652) and Pietro Mariani (1611-1665), a man of profound doctrine and diplomat, who stood out for his work aimed at improving the customs and education of the clergy.

Seventeenth-century map of Fiume dedicated to Baron Pietro de Argento, captain of the city from 1672 to 1694

Coat of arms of Rijeka granted by Emperor Leopold I on 6 June 1659

With the Pragmatic Sanction, issued by Emperor Charles VI in 1713, the principle of succession to the throne was introduced into the Habsburg monarchy also through women. All the states and provinces of the Empire were called upon to approve it and in 1720 the emperor also urged the “faithful, dear Judges and Council of the City of Rijeka” to this end.

A year earlier, with the patent of 18 March 1719 , Charles VI had established Fiume as a free port (together with Trieste). The port of Rijeka was granted important privileges, such as customs exemption for incoming and outgoing ships, and so the traffic of Rijeka, until then almost exclusively Adriatic, soon expanded to become Mediterranean.

Charles VI also provided for the strengthening of the access roads to the city: the road to Germany was widened, which connected Rijeka to Austria through Slovenia, and in 1726 the Carolina road (so called in honour of the Sovereign) was built, which connected Rijeka to Hungary through Croatia. The road system was completed in 1760 with the construction of the Giuseppina road, a side branch of the Carolina, which led from Bogliuno d’Istria to Kastav and then to Rijeka.

These measures strengthened Rijeka’s link with Hungary. In 1771 Rijeka “could already be considered essentially as a Hungarian port, since in that year its exports consisted of two-thirds of Hungarian goods, and only one-third of goods of Austrian origin” (Alfredo Fest).

In 1748, in order to unify the administration of the different municipalities of the Liburnian and Istrian coasts, Empress Maria Theresa, who succeeded Charles VI in 1740, established the Mercantile Province of the Littoral, dependent on an Intendenza that had its headquarters in Trieste, and Rijeka was also assigned to the new Province. The Hungarians, the Croats and of course the Rijeka protested against the centralization of maritime trade in Trieste.

Maria Theresa then issued the rescript of 14 February 1776: the administration of Rijeka was the responsibility of Hungary through the Council of Zagreb, i.e. through Croatia. Fiume was thus finally removed from the competition of Trieste, but the fact that the annexation to Hungary was carried out through Croatia aroused the clear opposition of the people of Rijeka. The Council protested and demanded that the city, which had always been “considered a separate province”, be annexed directly to the Kingdom of Hungary.

After more than a year of disputes, Maria Theresa retraced her steps: the Diploma of 23 April 1779, annexed to a new rescript, modified the situation in the direction desired by the people of Rijeka, establishing that this commercial city of Fiume S. Vito with its district must also be considered for the future as a separate body, annexed to the crown of the Kingdom of Hungary, and so it is to be treated in all respects and not to be confused in any respect with the district of Bakar which has belonged to the kingdom of Croatia from its beginnings.

The particular position of Rijeka as an “immediate city” was thus reaffirmed and strengthened, i.e. a body separate from any other province.

The Diploma of 1779 was however the subject of conflicting interpretations, giving rise to a historical-legal controversy that lasted over a century between Rijeka and Hungarians on the one hand and Croats on the other.

The policy of Maria Theresa and her successors, called “enlightened despotism”, promoted the economic development of Rijeka, but also led to a limitation of municipal autonomy. Although without questioning the Statute of 1530 and despite the Diploma of 1779, important attributions, such as the prerogative of appointing consuls, were taken away from the Council and the Municipality was subjected to greater control by the State.

In the eighteenth century, and especially in the years 1776-1809, i.e. in the first Hungarian period of Rijeka, the city experienced a remarkable development in various aspects, starting with the demographic: the population went from 5,132 to 8,958 souls with an increase of over 74%. Immigration from Istria, Friuli and Croatia increased. In 1733 some families of Serbs and Greeks of the Orthodox religion settled in Rijeka and in 1786 the Greek Church of St. Nicholas was built. Rijeka citizenship was conferred with generosity, because – as we read in a Council document of 1795 – “the advantage of a free maritime commercial city is to have numerous the People”.

The road system was strengthened with the construction (1803-1809) of a new, more modern road, parallel to Via Carolina, the Via Ludovicea. This favored the development of trade and was accompanied by the birth of new industrial activities: in 1750 a sugar refinery plant was built that employed over 700 people.

From 1775 Rijeka began to extend outside the city walls: new buildings were built along the sea and on the slopes of the hills. In 1722 the Lazzaretto was built, since the development of maritime traffic led to the arrival of ships from ports at risk.

The Palazzo del Governo (1780) and numerous other works in the “Baroque” style were built by the Trieste architect Antonio Gnamb, who worked for several years in the city together with other Italian architects and sculptors, such as the Treviso Minnini who designed the administration building of the Sugar Refinery in Baroque-Classicist style (1786).

In 1778 Rijeka had its first permanent printing press and a publishing house founded by Lorenzo Karletzky from Bohemia. Among the men of culture of Rijeka of the period should be remembered Giuseppe Bardarini, historian and author of important theological treatises, Giuseppe Zanchi, author of philosophical, theological, historical and scientific works; Francesco Saverio Orlando, erudite and polyglot, the preachers Ludovico Bajelardo and Giuseppe Francesco Spingaroli.

In the second half of the century an important medical school was formed in the city, at the instigation of Saverio Graziano, originally from Barletta and who became the city’s protophysician in 1740. In 1786 a School of Obstetrics was opened by the Rijeka surgeon Giacomo Cosmini. Nicolò Host, one of the greatest botanists of the time (Austrian Flora, 1827), was also a doctor by training.

Diploma of Maria Theresa of 1779 in which Rijeka is recognized as a “separate body annexed directly to the Crown of Hungary”

The French Revolution of 1789 and the war between France and the countries of the European coalition that broke out in 1793 did not produce significant effects on the life of Rijeka. But in 1796 the war affected northern Italy: the French attacked the papal cities of Ferrara, Bologna and Ancona, in March 1797 they entered Trieste and on 5 April occupied Fiume for a few days. With the Treaty of Campoformio (October 1797), which marked the end of the Republic of Venice, Rijeka continued to depend on the Austrian Empire, while Istria and Dalmatia passed to the French.

On 14 October 1809 with the Treaty of Schönbrunn Rijeka was ceded to France by the Empire of Austria – the title of Emperor of Austria had been assumed in 1804 by Francis II, who had thus put an end to the centuries-old existence of the Holy Roman Empire, becoming Francis I of Austria – and until 1813 it was part, within the Napoleonic Empire, of the Illyrian Provinces, a state that stretched from the Austro-Bavarian border to the Bay of Kotor. Rijeka thus came to depend again on Croatia and the city statute was abolished: on 7 March 1812 the new municipal council met chaired by the French-appointed maire or burgomaster, Paolo Scarpa. But, after a few months, in 1813, with the defeat of Napoleon in the Russian campaign, the Kvarner city returned to the Empire of Austria.

The municipal authorities of Rijeka, in a report to the Austrian government on October 27, 1813, drew a completely negative balance of the “inhuman French government”: a “deadly” taxation and “burdens of all kinds, almost inconceivable” had reduced the city to exhaustion. This explains the triumphal welcome given by the people of Rijeka to the Austrian general Laval Nugent, who entered Fiume at the end of August 1813.

The enthusiasm of the people of Rijeka for the return of the Austrian Empire, however, soon turned into disappointment: the city was not reincorporated into Hungary, did not see its municipal freedoms restored and continued to decline economically.

Finally, on 5 July 1822 , Emperor Franz I proclaimed his decision to return part of the Austrian Littoral with Rijeka to the Kingdom of Hungary. The decision aroused great joy in the people of Rijeka who joyfully welcomed Count György Majláth on 15 October 1822, who had come to the city to take it over in the name of the Hungarian Government: a choir of girls sang a hymn composed for the occasion in which it was said:

Now that we have returned / To the Kingdom of Hungary / Let each one be happy / And rejoice in the heart; / And to his beloved King / Who wise governs him / We swear eternal faith, / We swear eternal love.

The conditions prior to 1809 were restored with the Hungarian Littoral ruled by a Hungarian governor based in Rijeka and the administration of the city entrusted again to the City Council composed of 50 patricians. The period 1822-1848 constitutes the second Hungarian period of Rijeka, characterized by a renewed economic impetus and significant cultural development.

A great protagonist of the city’s renewal was Andrea Lodovico de Adamich (1767-1828): convinced that the economic future of Fiume depended on trade with the towns of the Danube basin, he gave life to several important entrepreneurial initiatives, including the foundation of a paper mill on the Eneo, later purchased in 1828 by Walter Smith, brother of the economist Adam, and Charles Meynier. Active in politics – he represented the city in 1822 at the Congress of Verona of the Holy Alliance and in 1825 at the Diet of Pressburg – he also contributed to the cultural development of Rijeka, designing and having a large theater built at his own expense, called Adamich in his honor (which was replaced in 1885 by the monumental Teatro Verdi).

Also worth mentioning are Gasparo Matcovich (1797-1881), entrepreneur and politician, to whom we owe the arrival in Fiume of Robert Whitehead, the creator of the Torpedo Factory, and Iginio Scarpa (1794-1866), son of Paolo who had been maire in the French period, to whom the tourist enhancement of Opatija dates. Finally, it is worth mentioning Count Laval Nugent von Westmeath, the liberator of the city in 1813, who, with Adamich’s help, bought and restored Trsat Castle, making it the family tomb and founding a museum there in 1843.

After a slight decline in the years 1810-1822, the population of Rijeka continued to grow, reaching 11,867 inhabitants in 1847.

In 1831 the project for a major expansion of the port was drawn up, but it was not carried out and improved until the second half of the century. The advent of rail transport put the construction of a railway line between Rijeka and Budapest on the agenda, which was also destined to be built in the years following the uprisings of 1848.

Industrial activity experienced considerable impetus. In 1851 the government bought the building of the old Sugar Refinery (closed in 1820) and inaugurated the new large tobacco factory. Smith and Meynier’s paper mill has already been mentioned: the large plant, located on both banks of the Fiumara about four kilometers from the city center, exported high-quality paper not only to Austria, but also to England and Brazil. In 1841 on the slopes of the mountain that leads to the valley called Žakalj, a grandiose flour factory was built (which in 1886 milled an average of 500 quintals of grains per day). The traditional shipbuilding industry also made a vigorous recovery: ships built in Rijeka were sought after in all countries, including America, and brought the city a profit of almost two million francs a year.

Several public utility works were established such as the General Institute for the Poor , also known as the Branchetta Institute, because it was financed by the brothers Antonio and Costantino Branchetta, merchants. In 1823 the new hospital was inaugurated; in 1833 the new Lazzaretto of San Francesco in Martinschizza was completed and in 1841 the Kindergarten of Charity for Children was founded.

In the development of the city’s cultural life, an important role was naturally played by the Theatre founded by Adamich, as well as by some private associations, including the Merchants’ Casino , which opened in 1806 and took the name of the Patriotic Casino in 1848. In 1813, in the printing house founded by Lorenzo Karletzky, which had taken the name of “Karletzky Brothers”, the first Rijeka newspaper Le Notizie del Giorno, the biweekly periodical l’Eco del Litorale ungarico (from 5 April 1843 to 4 April 1846) and other newspapers and magazines were printed.

In the field of medicine, the figure of Giovanni Battista Cambieri (1754-1838) should be remembered: born in 1754 near Pavia, he moved to Rijeka in 1797 where he carried out his activity as protophysician of the Littoral for 41 years, studying in depth the so-called Škrljevo disease, which raged especially in the rural areas of the area, and correctly classifying it as a form of syphilis to be treated with mercurial compounds. Cambieri was also a great philanthropist: for decades he covered the expenses for the care of the poor with his patrimony, which at his death he left entirely to the hospital where he worked.

A bust of Cambieri was sculpted in 1840 by the Rijeka sculptor Pietro Stefanutti (1822-1858), one of the protagonists of the Rijeka artistic life of the time. Also worth mentioning are the painters Francesco Colombo – who died at the age of twenty-three in 1843 and of whom few but significant works remain –, Alberto Angelovich (1822-1849), Marco Chiereghin (1777-1831) and above all Giovanni Simonetti (1817-86).

On May 9, 1821, a music school was opened under the direction of Wenceslas Wenczel and Joseph Prohaska. When Wenczel died in 1835, the management was taken over by Giovanni Zaytz, who in turn was replaced by his son Giovanni. Giovanni Zaytz jr (1832-1914) studied composition at the Milan Conservatory and in 1860 had his opera Amelia performed in Rijeka. Appointed director of the Zagreb Opera House in 1869, he devoted himself to composing a series of operas inspired by Croatian national history.

Anonymous pamphlet published in Rijeka in 1823 to celebrate the reincorporation into the Kingdom of Hungary (Rijeka Historical Museum Archive in Rome)

The European political order established by the Congress of Vienna was upset by the national-liberal movements. In 1848 they affected most of the European countries and in particular Italy and Hungary within the Austrian Empire.

In March 1848 Emperor Ferdinand I, who succeeded Francis I in 1835, appointed General Josip Jelačić, a supporter of the Triregnum , i.e. the union of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia within the Empire, as ban of Croatia, and on 3 June 1848 the Diet of Zagreb declared that it considered Croatia to be free from any juridical-administrative link with Hungary and that it “retained the districts of Rijeka, Buccari the seafarer or of Vinodol integral parts of the Triregnum”.

So on August 31 Rijeka was occupied by the Croatian troops of Josip Bunjevac, in the name of the ban of Croatia Jelačić and the Hungarian governor Erdödy had to abandon the city. On the same day, Bunjevac informed the Municipal Council of his intention to preserve “intact your municipal prerogatives, as well as your city institutions” and “the use of the Italian language“.

However, the Council protested against the arbitrary military occupation and sent a complaint to Jelačić in Zagreb, complaining about the lack of respect for the “universally used Italian language”, despite Bunjevac’s declared intentions.

In August 1849 the Hungarian Revolution ended in complete defeat and Austrian policy embarked on the path of a harsh absolutist restoration. This orientation changed after the unfavorable outcome for Austria in the war of 1859. In October 1860, Emperor Franz Joseph decided to restore an autonomous role to Hungary, thus opening up the prospect of re-annexation to the Hungarian Kingdom for the people of Rijeka.

The Council of Rijeka exerted continuous pressure on the emperor in this regard, referring to the Teresian Diploma of 1779 and denouncing on 31 January 1861 the policy of the Croatian authorities hostile to the “Italian language, which is also the one that has been spoken since Rijeka existed”. In April of the same year, called to elect their deputies to the Diet of Zagreb, the people of Rijeka overwhelmingly wrote “nobody” on the ballot!

Defeated in the war against Prussia in 1866, Austria finally decided to adopt partial decentralization. On 12 June 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) came into force: Hungary acquired an equal status with Austria and the Empire – which became Austro-Hungarian or Dual Monarchy – was divided into two parts united by the dynastic bond (and by three ministries in common): Cisleithania with Vienna as its capital and Transleithania with Budapest as its capital.

The question of Rijeka was also on its way to a solution: on 5 April 1867 , on the proposal of the Hungarian government, Edoardo de Cseh was appointed Extraordinary Commissioner of Rijeka, and was triumphantly welcomed by the people of Rijeka on 7 May. With this the Croatian rule ended and the link between the Kvarner city and Hungary was re-established. With the rescript of 26 May 1867 Rijeka had the right to a seat in the Hungarian Diet and in June of the same year the Rijeka elected the Hungarian Ákos Radics as deputy, who had promised to defend the city’s autonomy “and the only possible language for Rijeka, Italian”. Thus began the third Hungarian period of Rijeka, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

During the Croatian period, the population increased from 11,865 souls in 1847 to 17,884 in 1869.

In terms of commercial traffic , there was a setback, due to the absolutist-centralist orientation of Austrian policy, which, aimed at favoring Trieste, neglected the port works planned and begun in the second Hungarian period and the development of railway lines to Croatia and the Hungarian plain.

The crisis, on the other hand, spared the Rijeka industry (whose volume was equal to 50% of that of the industry of the whole of Croatia). The shipbuilding industry continued to develop, as did the Chemical Products Factory of the Rijeka Limited Company led by Walter Crafton Smith, the Metal Foundry – inaugurated in 1855, which would take the name of Technical Plant and in whose place the Whitehead torpedo factory would later be built – , the Tobacco Factory, which became the largest manufacture in the sector throughout the Empire, the Paper Mill, which exported paper all over the world, etc.

Industrial dynamism corresponded to a development of the banking sector. In 1855 the branch of the Austro-Hungarian Bank was opened in the city and on 1 January 1859 the local Cassa Comunale di Risparmio was established, which from 1859 to 1886 recorded a constant increase in capital and in the number of depositors.

On 1 August 1852 gas lighting was introduced in the city, in 1855 the telegraph line between Rijeka and Trieste was opened and in 1858 the one between Rijeka and Senj. The two banks of the Fiumara were joined by a new iron bridge.

On 26 March 1856, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian laid the foundation stone of the large building of the Naval Academy, which was solemnly inaugurated on 4 October of the following year.

As far as education is concerned, women’s education had a great boost. with the creation of several specific institutes from elementary to high school.

The Croatian cultural and political presence was of great importance in this period. Ljudevit Gaj, the founder of Illyrianism, moved the editorial office of his magazine Neven to Rijeka, and the most important Croatian intellectuals of the time taught in the city’s Croatian gymnasium. In 1855, the Narodna čitaonica riječka, the Croatian People’s Reading Hall, was opened. From 1861 to 1866 Ante Starčević lived in the Kvarner city, founder together with Eugen Kvaternik of the Croatian Party of Law, who was in close relations with Erazmo Barčić (1830-1913), an opponent of the autonomists in the name of an organic Croatian nationalist vision, which had one of its models in the Italian Risorgimento.

The Italian people of Rijeka opposed Croatian nationalism with a defence of Italianness on a linguistic and cultural level, while on a political level the “patriotism” they professed was unquestionably Hungarian. Uncompromising defense of municipal autonomy and Hungarian political loyalism: this position was supported by the city press, such as the Eco di Fiume, which appeared in 1854, and La Bilancia, a weekly and then daily founded in 1867 by the publisher and writer Emidio Mohovich.

Arguing this autonomist position on a scientific level was the task of Rijeka historiography, whose birth certificate dates back to the decision taken by the Rijeka Municipality on 3 July 1848, when the Croatian occupation of Rijeka was already in the air, to appoint a five-member historical commission to defend with a documented investigation “the rights [della città] of established by the Teresian Diploma of the year 1779 and subsequent related laws”. Giuseppe Politei, Ludovico Giuseppe Cimiotti, Girolamo Fabris, Giovanni Kobler and Pietro Rinaldi were called to join the Commission. The immediate result of this decision was the Rijeka Almanac, published annually from 1855 to 1860 by Politei.

One of the members of the Commission, the erudite Ludovico Giuseppe Cimiotti left unpublished a history of Fiume in six volumes written in Latin and entitled Publico-politica Terrae Fluminis S. Viti adumbratio historice ac diplomatice illustrata.

With the rescript of 7 November 1868 , Franz Joseph confirmed the position of Rijeka as a “separate body attached to the Holy Hungarian Crown” and invited the Hungarian Diet, the Croatian Diet and the city of Rijeka to elect their own deputations in order to reach a definitive agreement on the legal position of the city. The three deputations, however, failed to reach an agreement, limiting themselves to proposing a temporary solution, the so-called Provisorium, which never became definitive and remained in force until the collapse of the Empire in 1918!

The rescript of 28 July 1870 sanctioned the provisions of the Provisorium: the Governor of Rijeka and the Hungarian-Croatian coast, appointed by the king, was the intermediary between the Municipality and the government of Budapest and had political control of the city and the district, the administration of which was instead the responsibility of the City Hall on the basis of a Statute to be issued by the city itself.

Governor József Zichy took office on 14 December 1870 and on 7 April 1872 the Statute of the Free City of Rijeka and its district, drawn up by a Municipal Commission, was approved by the Hungarian government. In the Statute of 1872, Rijeka explicitly presented itself as a third factor on a par with Hungary and Croatia, so much so that in his official communication Governor Zichy recalled the principle of self-determination of the city: nihil de nobis sine nobis.

The Municipal Representation, i.e. the Council, composed of 50 councillors for the city and 6 for the district (the sub-municipalities of Plasse, Cosala, Drenova), lasted in office for six years and the Podestà was elected from among it.

The years 1869-1896 constitute the period of the so-called Hungarian idyll: close economic, social, political and cultural ties were established between Rijeka and Hungary. Through Rijeka, the interest of Hungarians in Italian culture intensified. The people of Rijeka, in turn, contributed to the spread of Hungarian literature in Italy: among the translators from Hungarian we must mention Pietro Zambra, Ernesto Brelich, Francesco Sirola, Silvino Gigante. Even after the dissolution of the Empire, this tradition continued in the twentieth century with Enrico Burich – translator in 1931 of the novel The Boys of Pál Street by Ferenc Molnár –, Antonio Widmar, Paolo Santarcangeli and Ignazio Balla, and with the Italian magazine Corvina published by the Matthias Corvinus Society of Budapest from 1921 to 1944.

The protagonist of the development of Fiume in this period was Giovanni de Ciotta (1834-1903), who led the city as Podestà from 1870 to 1896. A firm supporter of municipal autonomy and the link between Rijeka and Hungary, he did his utmost with energy and intelligence for the economic, social and cultural development of the city. Philanthropist and man of culture, in addition to the construction of the aqueduct that took its name from him, he promoted the construction of the new Municipal Theater (Verdi Theater today Zajć) and a rational urban arrangement of the city.

It should also be remembered that Opatija definitively established itself as an international tourist centre. In 1885 Opatija – which, although only 13 kilometers from Rijeka, was located in the Austrian part of the Monarchy – had become the “Austrian Nice”, a famous health resort frequented by the high society of all Europe.

Rijeka – The mineral oil refinery in 1883

“Rijeka, the most beautiful pearl in St. Stephen’s crown”: this was a recurring name in the publicity and speeches of Hungarian politicians of the time, aimed at emphasizing the fundamental importance of the city for Hungary at the time.

From 1869 to 1913 the population increased from 17,884 to 48,492 souls, thus increasing by 178%. According to the census of 1900, out of 38,955 inhabitants there were 17,305 Italians, 9,092 Croats and Slovenes; 12,558 Hungarians, Austrians, Jews and others.

The expansion of the port began on 18 February 1872: within nine years Rijeka had a port that in terms of size, equipment, warehouses for goods and railway connections could compete with the large European ports. From 1870 to 1913 the surface of port waters increased 10 times: in 1913 it was 62.2 hectares. The number of incoming and outgoing ships increased from 5,549 to 19,051 and their tonnage from 261,488 to 5,791,272. On the eve of the Great War, Fiume was the eighth port in Europe.

The extraordinary economic take-off of the city is also documented by the development of shipping companies, in which the Rijeka entrepreneur Luigi Ossoinack played a fundamental role. At least the Hungarian-English shipping company Adria should be remembered, which, founded in 1881, had its operational headquarters in Rijeka. In 1870 the Hungarian maritime navigation had only one steamer belonging to the port of Rijeka, in 1915 as many as 135 units.

Alongside the existing industries, new industrial realities of European importance arose, including the rice husking plant and starch factory (1881), the largest in the Empire, the Danubius shipyard (from 1911 Ganz-Danubius), the Oil Refinery (1882) and the torpedo factory.

The torpedo factory was founded in 1875, under the name Torpedofabrik Whitehead & Comp., by the Englishman Robert Whitehead (1823-1905), who transformed an invention of Giovanni Biagio Luppis (1816-1880) from Rijeka – the “save-coast”, a motor boat loaded with explosives to be directed against enemy ships – into a deadly device capable of moving under the surface of the sea. The perfected device became the modern torpedo, determining the advent of ships called torpedo boats, which launched the “torpedoes”, and providing the submarine, born from the end of the eighties of the century, with the decisive weapon. In 1881, Whitehead’s factory sold over 1,000 torpedo boats to several states, including England, Russia, and France.

Speaking of Giovanni de Ciotta, we have already mentioned the urban and architectural development of the city. Several famous architects worked in Rijeka: the Viennese Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, the Trieste Giacomo Zamattio, the Hungarians Ferenc Pfaff, who built the railway station, and Lipót (Leopold) Baumhorn, who built the great Synagogue, later destroyed by the Nazis, and above all Alajos Hauszmann who completed the Renaissance-style construction of the new grandiose Governor’s palace in 1896.

In 1914, the Fenice cinema-theater was built in Secession style and with a futuristic reinforced concrete structure, designed by the architects Theodor Träxler, from Vienna, and Eugenio Celligoi, from Rijeka, now unfortunately abandoned.

The most important artist of the period is Giovanni Fumi: born in Venice in 1849, he was active in Rijeka from 1883 to 1900, where he carried out decoration work in various public buildings and painted frescoes, altarpieces and portraits.

The Rijeka moors of the goldsmith Agostino Gigante had great fame and European diffusion who, taking up a Venetian tradition, made small jewels, applying on brooches, bracelets and necklaces Moor’s heads with the head and turban covered, respectively, with black and white enamel.

A sign of the great cultural progress of the city was the opening of the Civic Library in 1893 and the birth of new important associations, including the Society of Artisans (1869), whose president was the publisher and historian Emidio Mohovich, the Philharmonic-Dramatic Society (1872), which had among its members the most important personalities of the city’s cultural, economic and political life, and the Literary Circle (1893) which invited the leading Italian writers and writers of the time to hold conferences in Fiume and published two periodicals, La Vita Fiumana and La Vedetta. Among the sports associations are the Eneo Nautical Society (1892) and the Rijeka Alpine Club (1885) which had the historian Egisto Rossi and the naturalist Guido Depoli among its animators and its press organ in the magazine Liburnia, which is still published today in exile.

This was also the period of the flowering of Rijeka historiography. In addition to Emidio Mohovich, who left us a valuable work on the Croatian period (Rijeka in the years 1867 and 1868) published in 1869, we must mention Vincenzo Tomsich (? – 1887) author of the first history of Rijeka, published in 1886 with the title Historical news on the city of Rijeka, a volume full of documents often reproduced in full.

Memoirs for the history of the Liburnian city of Rijeka is the title of the three-volume work by the great scholar Johann Kobler (1811-1893). The work, a masterpiece of positivist historiography and a monument to the autonomy of Rijeka, was published posthumously in 1896 by the City Hall by Aladár (Alfredo) Fest, a Hungarian-Rijeka historian, author in turn of fundamental works on the history of the city

Part of Fest’s essays were published in the Bullettino della Deputazione fiume di storia patria, the first volume of which appeared in 1910 with a presentation by Egisto Rossi (1881-1908), a brilliant intellectual and historian who died very young. The Bullettino was published until 1921 and in 1910 it was joined by the Monuments of Rijeka history edited by Silvino Gigante.

The Croatian presence in Rijeka was also relevant in the third Hungarian period. In 1878, Erazmo Barčić founded the newspaper Sloboda in nearby Sušak, to claim the rights of Croats in Rijeka. From 1900 the Croatian politician Frano Supilo (1870-1917) also worked in the Kvarner city.

Giovanni de Ciotta (1824 – 1903) podestà of Fiume for twenty-six years in the period of the “Hungarian idyll”

In the 1990s, Hungarian politics, under the government of Dezső Bánffy (1895-1899), underwent a change in a nationalistic and centralist direction. In Hungary, as in all European countries, the ideology of nationalism was rapidly asserting itself. The new Magyar orientation led to the questioning of the special position of Rijeka defined by the Provisional and the Statute of 1872. The “Hungarian idyll” had entered a crisis.

To defend the threatened autonomy, in 1896 the Autonomous Association or Autonomous Party of Rijeka was born by a group of young people led by the brilliant lawyer Michele Maylender (1863-1911), which already achieved a resounding success in the municipal elections of the following year. Maylender was elected podestà and in his inaugural speech he declared:

The only source and root of Rijeka’s love for Hungary, the origin of the special patriotism of the people of Rijeka for the Hungarian nation, is to be sought exclusively and solely in the autonomy that Rijeka enjoys and that the government respects. If one wanted to take away from the Municipality of Rijeka the right to administer municipal affairs on an autonomous basis, if one wanted to take away the Italian language, in that case the tree of our patriotism, deeply damaged at its roots, would absolutely have to perish. One cannot imagine Hungarian patriotism in Rijeka separated from autonomy.

The battle in defense of municipal autonomy had its voice in the weekly La Difesa founded by Maylender on September 25, 1898 and the tug-of-war between the City Council and the central government lasted until the beginning of 1901, when an agreement was laboriously reached.

After being elected podestà in 1901 for the sixth time, Maylender resigned due to internal disagreements within the Party and devoted himself for a decade to the drafting of a monumental History of the Italian Academies in five volumes (it was published posthumously in 1926). Maylender’s resignation corresponded to the rise of Riccardo Zanella who soon became the head of the Autonomous Party and in 1905 he was also elected deputy to the Hungarian Parliament.

The opposing nationalisms were growing and undermined the structure of the Empire from within. From this point of view, the position of the Rijeka autonomists constituted an anomaly: extraneous to modern nationalism, it defended the “autonomies” of the plurinational Empire, whose political legitimacy it did not question. But the pressure of nationalism was now also being felt in Rijeka.

From 1873 to 1897 Croatian patriots had taken control of the administration of all Dalmatian cities except Zadar from the Italians. In 1900 Supilo founded the newspaper Novi List in Rijeka Frano and was one of the promoters of the Rijeka Resolution of 2-3 October 1905 in which he hoped for the union of Dalmatia, Istria and Rijeka with Croatia-Slavonia. Croatian publishing activity in the Kvarner city developed mainly through the work of the Dalmatian priest Bernardin Nikola Škrivanić who gave life to publishing houses and various periodicals.

A few months before the Supilo Resolution, in July 1905 some young Italian patriots – Gino Sirola, Armando Hodnig (Odenigo), Luigi Cussar and others – on the model of Mazzini’s Giovine Italia had founded the Circolo Giovine Fiume

Italian irredentism thus became an organized political reality in Fiume and from 6 April 1908 it also had its own press organ, the biweekly periodical La Giovine Fiume, born from the initiative of a group of “elders” who had joined the society, including Icilio Baccich, Riccardo and Silvino Gigante, Egisto Rossi, Lionello Lenaz.

The irredentists of the Giovine Fiume, although a minority, gave life to various initiatives that increased their visibility, such as the participation, together with the Florentines and the Italian irredents of Austria, in the Dante celebrations in Ravenna in 1908, but also aroused the suspicion of the authorities. In January 1910 the irredentist periodical was suppressed and on 22 January 1912 Governor Wickenburg also dissolved the association.

From 1910 to 1914 Wickenburg promoted a harsh policy of repression and Magyarization. In June 1913 the State Police was introduced into the city, in violation of the Statute of 1872, and the climate became incandescent. Some adherents of the Giovine Fiume placed a bomb on the windowsill of the Government building that only caused the breaking of many panes. A few months later, on the night between 1 and 2 March 1914, a new bomb exploded in the garden of the Government building, again without serious consequences. But it soon came to light that the attack had been organized by a confidant of the police to justify the repression against irredentists and the “inconvenient” Rijeka! The scandal was enormous. Autonomists and irredentists came closer together: on March 23 Riccardo Gigante published the single issue La Bomba, financed by Zanella, in which he accused the Hungarian police of having hatched the plot in agreement with Governor Wickenburg and asked to “be indicted in order to be able to bring the evidence of his accusation before the judges”. But there was no trial: after a few months the war broke out and in March 1915 Gigante fled to Italy.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Dual Monarchy, and his wife Sofia, on an official visit to Sarajevo, were killed by the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. It was the spark that ignited the First World War. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and on August 4, Germany, Russia, England, and France had already entered the war through the mechanism of alliances. All of Europe was in flames.

The attitude of Italy, which had declared its neutrality on 3 August, was followed anxiously in Fiume. The situation of the city began to be known in Italy only shortly before the outbreak of the war through La Voce di Prezzolini in Florence, in which the Rijeka Gemma Harasim and Enrico Burich collaborated. An important article on The tragedy of the Italianness of Rijeka was published on 28 August 1913 by Burich, who was joined by Icilio Bacich with several writings.

On 26 April 1915 the Pact of London was signed: in exchange for intervention on the side of the Entente powers, Italy would obtain Trentino, Alto Adige, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria up to Kvarner and a part of Dalmatia, but not Rijeka. The news of the pact, the clauses of which should have remained secret, immediately leaked out also in Fiume and the absence of the city from the list of transfers promised to Italy also leaked out.

On 23 May 1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary and on the 24th Italian troops vacated the Piave border.

Numerous Rijeka had already been called up to arms and sent to fight in Eastern Europe against the Russians in Galicia and Bukovina. Many others, suspected of harboring pro-Italian sentiments, were interned in the Hungarian camps of Tápiósüly and Kiskunhalas; the authorities responded to the protests of the podestà Francesco Gilberto Corossacz with the dissolution of the Municipal Council. In Tápiósüly, today Sülysáp, about 800 civilians of Italian nationality were interned, almost all from Rijeka. Political dissidents from Rijeka, including Francesco Drenig, Attilio Depoli, Guido Depoli and Luigi Cussar, were confined to Kiskunhalas.

Between the summer of 1914 and the spring of 1915 more than one hundred young people from Rijeka fled to Italy to enlist as volunteers: 9 fell in battle, 6 died of war, 55 were decorated, 24 were sentenced to death in absentia for high treason by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Mention should be made of the brothers Baccich (Bacci) – Icilio (1879-1945), Iti (1892-1954) and Ipparco (1890-1916), who died in combat – and the fallen Mario Angheben (1893-1915) and Annibale Noferi (1895?-1916), who, having emigrated to Brazil in 1912 at the outbreak of the war, had returned to Italy to enlist as a volunteer. Riccardo Gigante, sheltered in Italy in 1914, remained at the front as a volunteer for the duration of the conflict, contributing to war propaganda. Giovanni(Nino) Host (later Host-Venturi) (1892-1980), who had also taken refuge in Italy since 1911, was wounded twice and awarded three silver medals.

Among the volunteers of autonomist origin we find Zanella’s closest collaborator Mario Blasich (1878-1945): instead of asking for the exemption to which he was entitled as a doctor and protophysicist of Fiume, he enlisted and then deserted on the Russian front and, having come to Italy, lent his work as a medical captain in front-line departments. Giuseppe Sussain (1864-1921), despite being over fifty, volunteered for the Italian army and asked to be sent to the front line. Umberto D’Ancona (1896-1964), biologist and zoologist of international fame, sheltered in Rome at the beginning of the war, enlisted in the Italian army at a very young age and was wounded on the Karst. The head of the Autonomous Party Riccardo Zanella, sent to the Russian front, deserted and reached Italy, where he created the National Committee for Rijeka and Kvarner with the aim of annexing Rijeka to Italy.

From 15 to 23 June 1918 the battle of the Piave marked the defeat of the Austrians. The defeat of the Empire was now in the air. On 1 October 1918, representatives of all nationalities in the Austrian parliament affirmed their right to national independence. On 6 October, the “Plenary Council of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes” in Zabagria declared the end of all relations with Budapest, so the Croats did not intervene in the session of the Hungarian parliament on 18 October. In this session, the deputy of Rijeka Andrea Ossoinack protested vigorously against a possible annexation of Rijeka to Croatia, declaring:

[…] I consider it my implicit duty […] to raise a formal protest in this Chamber, in front of the whole world, against anyone who wants to concede Rijeka to the Croats. […] Because Rijeka was not only never Croatian, but, on the contrary, it was Italian in the past and Italian will remain Italian in the future! […] With reference to this consideration, I take the liberty, as a deputy of Rijeka, […] to make the following declaration: Since Austria-Hungary, in its peace proposal, sets as a fundamental condition the right of self-determination of peoples, proclaimed by Wilson, so Rijeka claims as a “corpus separatum” this same right for itself, and in accordance it claims to exercise in full the right of self, without any limitation, the right of self-determination of peoples.

After a few days, on 29 October, the Italian troops broke through the enemy front at Vittorio Veneto and on 3 November entered Trento and Trieste. On 4 November hostilities finally ended.

October 29, 1918 was a crucial day for Rijeka. The Croatian parliament proclaimed the “Sovereign National State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs” with Rijeka and Dalmatia – which on 1 December became the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” (SHS) ruled by the Karadordevic dynasty, the Hungarian governor Jekelfalussy abandoned Rijeka and the National Council in Zagreb appointed Konstantin Rojčević as commissioner for the territory of Rijeka-Sušak.

At 10 a.m. on 29 October, about sixty citizens gathered in the hall of the Municipal Council of Rijeka and the president of the assembly Antonio Grossich, a famous doctor and writer, invoked Rijeka’s right to self-determination. The assembly confirmed the podestà Antonio Vio in office, constituted itself as a city committee which assumed full powers and appointed a steering committee from among it. Fiume thus posed itself as an independent state, refusing to be considered a passive object of negotiations between the powers. In the evening the City Committee, meeting in the hall of the Philharmonic, took the name of the Italian National Council of Rijeka chaired by Antonio Grossich. The following morning the Council approved a proclamation-manifesto to be posted in the city: thus was born the Proclamation of annexation of Fiume to Italy on October 30, 1918 . Here is the text:

The Italian National Council of Rijeka, meeting today in plenary session, declares that by virtue of that right, by which all peoples have arisen to national independence and freedom, the city of Rijeka, which until now was a separate body constituting an Italian national municipality, also claims for itself the right of self-determination of the people. On the basis of this right, the National Council proclaimed Rijeka united with its motherland, Italy. The Italian National Council considers the state of affairs which took place on October 29, 1918, to be provisional, places its decision under the protection of America, the mother of universal liberty and democracy, and awaits the sanction of it from the Peace Congress.

At the same time, in the Government Building, the representative of the Zagreb Council, Konstantin Rojčević, declared that he was assuming state power over the city of Rijeka! Thus a genuine dualism of powers was created in the Kvarner city.

A large Italian demonstration took place in the early afternoon of the same 30 October: the Proclamation of annexation was read publicly and was acclaimed by a crowd of about 20,000 people. A few hours later a procession with Croatian flags, moving from Sušak, crossed the city.

The National Council urged the Italian government to intervene and so on the morning of 4 November 1918, a few hours before the armistice came into force, four Italian ships entered the port of Rijeka, welcomed by a cheering crowd. But Admiral Rainer, commander of the small fleet, maintained an equidistant attitude, conditioned by the difficult international situation. Therefore, the National Council, by sending its representatives to Italy, tried in every way to modify the attitude of the Italian Government dictated by Foreign Minister Sonnino, a supporter of a strict application of the Pact of London.

A turning point occurred on 17 November: Rijeka was subjected to an inter-allied occupation, the Croatian authorities abandoned the city and the Italian National Council became the sole body of power. The situation remained undefined, however, since Fiume had not been occupied by Italy, but by the Entente, which made an essential difference.

In the meantime, the Steering Committee of the National Council had assumed the functions of a real provisional government and Rijeka behaved as an independent state, also equipping itself with its own Constitution, the draft of which was prepared on 3 December 1918. On 5 December 1918 the head of the Autonomous Party Riccardo Zanella returned to Rijeka, but he soon came into conflict with the National Council.

At the Peace Conference, which opened in Paris on 18 January 1919, the question of Fiume proved to be an inextricable knot for the Italian government: the irreducible opponent of the annexation of Fiume to Italy was the President of the United States Wilson and England and France were also in favour of the territorial requests of the SHS Kingdom.

Meanwhile, in the Kvarner city, the tension between the population and the French military, which had already manifested itself in the previous months, exploded on July 2, 1919 with serious accidents that caused some deaths and injuries. The Paris Conference sent a Commission of Inquiry to Rijeka, which concluded its work after a month in a way that was completely unfavourable to the people of Rijeka, ordering the dissolution of the National Council and total inter-allied control of the city. Moreover, the new Italian government of Francesco Saverio Nitti, in office since June 23, seemed to consent.

In Rijeka, the aversion against the Allied powers increased, as well as the fear of being abandoned to the Croats. After all, at the end of August the Grenadiers of Sardinia, the first Italian soldiers who entered Fiume on November 17 of the previous year, had had to leave the city, accompanied – at five in the morning! – by an immense crowd.

The Peace Treaty with Austria was signed in Paris on 10 September 1919: it provided for a simple renunciation by Vienna of the territories of the eastern Adriatic and the new Italian eastern border continued to remain undefined.

The disappointing results achieved by Italy at the Peace Conference contributed to the spread in Italian public opinion of the idea of the “mutilated victory”, of which Gabriele d’Annunzio, a poet of European fame and also well known as a highly decorated fighter and protagonist of a series of exceptional war actions, such as the “mockery of Bakar” of 10-11 February 1918 and the “flight over Vienna” of 9 August 1918.

Already on 15 November 1918 d’Annunzio had assured his support to the envoys of the Rijeka National Council met in Venice. In May 1919 some officers of the grenadiers, the so-called Seven Jurors of Ronchi, forced to leave Fiume a short time before, put themselves under his orders: so on the night between 11 and 12 September 1919 d’Annunzio with a column of “Legionaries” moved from Ronchi and, without being opposed by the troops of the regular army, at noon on 12 September he entered Fiume welcomed by an overflowing crowd. The Allied forces left the city and the inter-allied command was replaced by the Italian command. D’Annunzio’s enterprise thus made Italy regain that influence in the Adriatic that the Peace Conference had denied it.

On 20 September 1919 d’Annunzio confirmed the Italian National Council in office , reserving for himself the power of control over the most important acts. Two days earlier he had met Zanella and between the two there had immediately been a profound disagreement on the prospects of the company and on relations with the Italian government, a disagreement that soon turned into an open rupture.

On October 26, 1919, elections were held for the renewal of the Municipal Council (still called the National Council) on the basis of the new electoral law which, approved a few days before the entry of the Legionaries, extended the vote to women.

The vast majority of the votes went to the National Union which grouped the parties in favor of annexation.

The Nitti government – which feared the destabilizing effect of the Enterprise for the Italian state structure shaken by a deep economic and political crisis – tried in various ways the path of compromise and at the end of November proposed to d’Annunzio a modus vivendi in which, in exchange for the withdrawal of the Legionaries, it undertook not to separate Fiume from the motherland, postponing the final solution of the question to a more favorable time.

The National Council approved the proposal, but the poet – reluctant to abandon an enterprise whose moral value went beyond the specific question of Fiume for him – opposed it and promised to resort to a plebiscite. The consultation was held on December 18, but towards evening, when the prevalence of votes in favor of acceptance was outlined, d’Annunzio suspended the counting and the following day justified himself with a speech in which he opposed the “sad ballot boxes” of the elections with the real “inexhaustible ballot box” of the “heroic soul” of the Fiumani.

The events of December 1919 marked the beginning of a second phase of the Enterprise. The intransigent and revolutionary component of D’Annunzioism came to the fore: on 20 January 1920 the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste de Ambris became head of the Commander’s cabinet, republican ideas and social palingenesis spread in some legionary circles, the weight of futurists such as Mario Carli increased.

On 8 September 1920 d’Annunzio solemnly proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a provisional State of Fiume awaiting annexation to Italy, and promulgated the Carta del Carnaro, the new constitution of the city drawn up by De Ambris and revised by the poet. Fiume became, with the poet’s expression, the “City of Life”, a sort of experimental society, with new ideas and values, often transgressive with respect to current morality and politics.

All this had the effect of disorienting the moderates, arousing concerns within the National Council and arousing defections even among the soldiers who came to Fiume with d’Annunzio.

In the meantime, the conflict with the Italian government was escalating, also fomented by Zanella, who called for a military intervention by Italy, and by the propaganda of his followers in Fiume. Old and new tensions were manifesting themselves in the city, where the fascist movement was taking hold, as in the whole country. A first Fascio di combattimento formed in May on the initiative of Mario Carli had been replaced in August by a second Fascio controlled by Francesco Giunta from Trieste.

In this climate, the news of the Treaty of Rapallo, signed on 12 November 1920 between Italy (the government was led by Giovanni Giolitti, who took over from Nitti in June) and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, reached Rijeka: Italy obtained Istria, renounced Dalmatia with the exception of Zara and Fiume was constituted as a free state, the Delta and Port Baross ceded to Croatia were amputated.

D’Annunzio, with the support of the National Council, rejected the Treaty and occupied the islands of Krk and Rab. General Enrico Caviglia, commander of the Italian troops in Venezia Giulia, ordered him to vacate the islands and leave the city. But d’Annunzio, although abandoned by other elements of his circle such as General Ceccherini, did not give in and on 21 December the Regency proclaimed a state of war: the fratricidal struggle began on the evening of Christmas Eve and lasted five days, causing the death of 53 soldiers and 5 civilians. Finally, in order to avoid the bombardment of the city, on December 28 the poet resigned himself and the government of the Regency and put power back in the hands of the National Council.

On January 1, 1921, the funeral of the fallen in the clashes of the “Bloody Christmas” took place at the city cemetery of Cosala. D’Annunzio gave the last farewell to his Legionaries and the soldiers of the regular troops, all brothers “lined up in perpetual silence, clinging to eternal rest”: “[t]he we have all covered them with the same laurel and the same flag. The aroma of laurel overcomes the gloomy smell and the flag embraces discord.”

D’Annunzio in Fiume 1919

Letter from d’Annunzio to Riccardo Gigante announcing Toscanini’s arrival in Fiume for November 20, 1920

Rijeka legionnaires during the “Bloody Christmas” of 1920

The end of D’Annunzio’s regime did not lead to the restoration of legality and the normalization of city life. Not all the legionnaires left the city and the Italian government did not prevent the influx of ex-legionnaires, nationalists and fascists before the elections of the Constituent Assembly of the new state established by the Treaty of Rapallo and indeed worked to counter the autonomists of Zanella through the plenipotentiary minister Carlo Caccia Dominioni, who arrived in the city on February 5, 1921.

Nevertheless, the elections of April 24, 1921 marked a clear victory for the autonomists: out of 10,550 voters, 9,554 voted, 6,114 votes went to the Autonomous Party and 3,440 to the Annexationist Bloc. When the news of the victory of the autonomists began to circulate, a group of ex-legionnaires and fascists, led by Riccardo Gigante, set fire to the ballot boxes The minutes, however, had already been saved, so the action was useless and the results of the elections were regularly proclaimed.

The situation of public order continued to be very bad: in a letter to Giolitti dated 30 April, Zanella denounced the terror sown by an “armed faction of about 600 individuals […,] extraneous to the local parties” under the orders of the Trieste Fascist Party and favored by the “culpable passivity” of a large part of the Carabinieri and demanded their disarmament. But the government did very little, which was unable to stem the multiplication of violence even in Italy.

Thus the attempts to prevent the head of the Autonomous Party from assuming power continued, to the point that the autonomist majority of the Constituent Assembly had to move briefly to Bakar under the protection of the Yugoslav government!

Finally, on 5 October 1921 , General Luigi Amantea, High Commissioner of the Italian Government, ordered the convocation of the Assembly, which elected Zanella as provisional President of the State. Zanella tried to bring the situation back to normal, but was unable to resolve the very serious situation of public order. On February 3, 1922, following the throwing of a firecracker at his car, the Constituent Assembly had to suspend the sessions indefinitely!

The fall of the Zanellian government was now in the air. Following the killing of the young ex-legionnaire Alfredo Fontana on 1 March and attributed to the Zanellian guards, the Rijeka Fascist Party set up a National Defence Committee together with the nationalists and republicans and at dawn on 3 March 1922 attacked the Government building with gunfire, also taken with cannons from the sea by a MAS led by Francesco Giunta. Zanella was forced to surrender and his followers took refuge in Portorè (Kraljevica) in Yugoslavia, where they met as the Constituent Assembly in exile, attempting an extreme resistance against the fait accompli.

The authors of the coup d’état demanded that the administration of the city be taken over by the Italian government, which, bound by the Treaty of Rapallo, proposed instead a “Rijeka” solution. So on April 5, the Constituent Assembly that remained in Rijeka, i.e. the annexationist minority, appointed Vice-President Attilio Depoli as provisional head of the State of Rijeka, immediately recognized by the Italian government. But this did not improve the situation at all. Zanella and the autonomists protested continuously in all national and international forums, fascist violence intensified and economic inactivity had lasted for five years with disastrous effects. Depoli, embittered by the conditions of the city, was about to resign.

In September 1923 the Italian government appointed General Gaetano Giardino as military governor of Rijeka, to whom Depoli transmitted his powers. An independent river now existed only on paper. Yugoslavia itself had an interest in closing the dispute with Italy and so in the same month negotiations began between the two countries that led, on January 27, 1924, to the signing of the Treaty of Rome: Fiume, except for the Delta and port Baross which went to Yugoslavia, was finally annexed toItaly.

The news of the Treaty reached Fiume on the evening of 27 January, greeted by great demonstrations of jubilation. On March 16, 1924, Governor Giardino proclaimed the annexation from the Government Palace in front of an immense crowd and in the presence of the King of Italy Vittorio Emanuele III.

Riccardo Zanella

Rijeka constituent assembly (autonomist majority) in Portoré after the coup d’état of March 1922

On 27 January 1924 Rijeka became the capital of the new Italian province of Carnaro. The annexation to Italy put an end to a long period of unrest and instability, but did not produce any improvement on the economic level. Deprived of its hinterland, subjected to competition from nearby Sušak, subjected to a heavy tax regime, in the years from 1924 to 1934 the city recorded a serious economic decline: with the partial exceptions of the Oil Refinery (which became Romsa, Raffineria Olii Minerali Società Anonima) and the Tobacco Factory, the number of employees in industrial activities decreased and the population also fell from 55,000 to 45,000 inhabitants. Above all, the port of Rijeka seemed to languish without hope: “grass now grows in the port!” had become a common saying.

Some economic agreements made with Yugoslavia did not have significant consequences and the crisis of 1929 aggravated the situation, causing massive layoffs in all sectors. The attempt to promote a policy of friendship with the Karađorđević kingdom also failed because of the Italian Adriatic policy aimed at controlling Albania and, after 1929, because of the support provided by Rome to the Croatian politician Ante Pavelić, founder of the “Ustaše” movement (from the verb ustati, “to rise up”), sentenced to death by the Belgrade government.

A turning point occurred starting in 1934 with the stipulation of important economic agreements between Italy, Austria and Hungary and above all with the increase in state orders for local industry due to war expenses (Ethiopian campaign, Spanish war and, finally, World War II). To this was added in 1937 a rapprochement between Italy and Yugoslavia which led to the establishment of an Italian-Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce in Rijeka.

The struggle of Fiume for annexation had been given formal recognition with the appointment in 1934 of Icilio Bacci (Baccich) and Riccardo Gigante as senators of the Kingdom. In the second half of the thirties, however, the people of Rijeka were progressively replaced in the key posts of the Fascist Party and the institutions by elements from Italy who, unaware of the ethnic and cultural complexity of the Kvarner area and bearers of an authoritarian mentality, aggravated the damage caused by the nationalistic arrogance of the regime.

The racial laws of 1938 worsened the situation and indirectly gave a further impetus to the policy of fascistization and Italianization of Croats and Slovenes, which reached its peak after the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 (see next chapter). And it was a fascist from Rijeka, Riccardo Gigante, in an article in La Vedetta d’Italia of November 14, 1944 who harshly denounced this “wretched policy”:

Our knowledge of places and populations was not given weight; our warning that Dalmatia was no longer what it was at the time of Tommaseo and Bajamonti, was not taken into account; our understanding of old irredentists for minority rights was mocked: our remark about the difference in treatment of Slovenes and Croats was judged unfounded. […] And the new populations continued to be rudely wounded in what they held most dear and to rage against them with the most stolid persecutions.

Even during the Fascist period, despite the nationalistic policy of the regime, Fiume did not abdicate its function as a bridge to the Danube-Balkan world. Francesco Drenig published Hungarian and Croatian writers in the magazine La Fiumanella, which he founded in 1921, and from 1923 to 1925 he directed the magazine Delta, a title that alluded to the role of Rijeka: “a delta on which our ancient civilization comes into contact with new civilizations in turmoil”. Finally, he collaborated with the magazine Termini, published in Rijeka from 1936 to 1943 with the intention “of extending a hand to scholars, writers, writers, journalists from Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian lands”.

The historiography of Rijeka achieved important results in this period. In 1923 the Society of Rijeka Studies was founded, in continuity with the Rijeka Deputation of Homeland History, which had its organ in the six-monthly magazine Fiume: the magazine hosted important scientific contributions by Attilio and Guido Depoli, Riccardo and Silvino Gigante, Alfredo Fest, Belario Lengyel, Giovanni Regalati, Mario Smoquina, Giuseppe Viezzoli and others.

The city was enriched with some remarkable architectural works. The Capuchin Church, whose lower floor had been built in the years 1904-1908, was completed in 1929. From 1928 to 1934 the Votive Temple of Kozala was built, designed by the architect Bruno Angheben and in which Rijeka artists such as Romolo Venucci, Edmondo Dal Zotto and Ladislao de Gauss collaborated. Between 1939 and 1942 the skyscraper designed by the Trieste architect Umberto Nordio was built.

The anti-fascist opposition showed little signs of life, starting with the autonomists, whose roots remained deep, as subsequent events would show. During the unrest that occurred on May 1, 1927, the republican Angelo Adam was forced to flee to Sušak from where he reached Paris to join the Anti-Fascist Concentration. Throughout 1940 the Special Fascist Court judged twelve people for subversive activity in Rijeka, issuing ten sentences of conviction; the highest sentence, 12 years and 7 months, was imposed on Leo Valiani, who was then still called Weiczen, tried together with Giacomo Rebez and others on November 26, 1931.

Ceremony at the newly built votive temple

On 10 June 1940 Italy joined Germany in the war that had begun on 1 September of the previous year with the German invasion of Poland and declared war on France and Great Britain; on 28 October he attacked Greece.

On 26-27 March 1941, the government of Yugoslavia of regent Paul Karađorđević, which had joined the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, was overthrown by a coup d’état and replaced by a pro-British government. Germany then decided to invade Yugoslavia: on 6 April 1941 German troops entered the country, followed a few days later by Italian troops, who on 11 April entered Ljubljana and in Rijeka crossed the bridge over the Eneo to occupy Sušak.

On 13 April, the Germans occupied Belgrade and the Yugoslav ministers with King Peter Karađorđević took refuge in London, creating a government in exile. The territory of Yugoslavia was partly divided and partly controlled by Germany and Italy. The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established with Ante Pavelić at its head, who arrived in Zagreb from Italy.

Southern Slovenia and a part of Dalmatia, erected as a Governorate, were annexed to Italy, and the Province of Carnaro was expanded, arousing in some circles the illusion of a recovery of the role of Fiume as a port of call for the mid-Danube basin. In reality, in the new province the Italians of Fiume found themselves in a clear minority from one day to the next and the traditional Croatian and Slovene nationalist claims were soon combined with the struggle of the Slavic communists.

Between 1941 and 1942 partisan groups were already operating in various locations on Monte Nevoso. On April 24, 1942, a curfew was imposed in the north-western area of the Province of Carnaro, harsh reprisals were ordered by the prefect Testa and from May to September dozens of people believed to be accomplices of the partisans were shot, especially in the area of Kastav. In Podhum, a few kilometers from Rijeka, on July 12, 92 (Italian sources) to 120 (Croatian sources) inhabitants of the town, which was then set on fire, were massacred in retaliation for the kidnapping of an Italian teacher and his wife.

Families suspected of having their own members among the partisans were interned in concentration camps in various locations in Yugoslavia, Among the Italian camps should be mentioned that of Rab, where mainly Slovenian civilians and prisoners of war were interned in very harsh conditions of detention, and that of Gonars in Friuli. Almost 100,000 Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Montenegrins were sorted into camps set up in various Italian locations.

On 25 July 1943 the Grand Council of Fascism deprived Mussolini of his authority and the king entrusted the government of the country to General Pietro Badoglio. On September 8 , Badoglio read on the radio the proclamation of the armistice signed a few days earlier. The Italian troops were left in disarray, without precise orders and at the mercy of the German army. On 12 September Mussolini, who was held prisoner on the Gran Sasso, was freed by a German commando and on the 23rd he formed the new government of the Italian Social Republic in Salò, under German protection.

In the military debacle following the armistice, many officers chose to give up their weapons in exchange for safety, but not a few decided to continue fighting: in the Balkans from 8,000 to 12,000 Italian soldiers joined the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Movement (MPL), while a minority agreed to join Mussolini’s new Republic.

After 8 September, the Yugoslav MPL briefly took power in Istria: hundreds of people were arrested and thrown into the pit or bauxite quarries scattered throughout the Istrian countryside. The total number of victims probably ranges from 650 to 750 people. To end up in the foibe were all those who could be identified with the Italian institutions, even potential opponents: thus were killed, among many, the parish priest of Villa di Rovigno, Don Angelo Tarticchio, the three very young Radecchi sisters, one of whom was in an advanced state of pregnancy, and the student Norma Cossetto of Santa Domenica di Visinada, tortured and tortured.

The issue of the foibe was also raised by Italian anti-fascists and communists, such as Pino Budicin from Rovinj who in December 1943 harshly denounced the methods used to liquidate the supposed “enemies of the people”. In general, the participation of the Italians in the Resistance in the territories of the eastern border encountered serious difficulties.

In fact, the Yugoslav resistance movement, unlike the Italian one, was soon hegemonized by the communists of Josip Broz known as Tito, supporters of a revolutionary transformation of the Yugoslav state and society and assertors of an absolutely intransigent position on the national question and borders. On 16 September the annexation of Trieste, Gorizia and Monfalcone to the future Yugoslavia was unilaterally proclaimed and on 20 September that of Fiume, Istria and Zara. The position of the Italian anti-fascists – who argued for the opportunity to decide the political affiliation of the disputed territories after the common victory over Nazi-fascism – was not even taken into consideration. It was indeed decided that the Italian communists had to join the Croatian and Slovenian Communist Parties and in July 1944 the Union of Italians of Istria and Rijeka (UIIF) was established, a transmission belt of the Croatian and Slovenian Communist Parties, which supported the annexation of the territories in question to the future Yugoslavia. Finally, in October 1944, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) also gave its support to this position.

In the aftermath of the armistice, on 14 September Rijeka was occupied by the German troops of Colonel Kaspar Völker, who soon regained control of the coastal strip. In October 1943, the Adriatic Littoral Zone of Operations (OZAK) was established, which included Udine, Gorizia, Ljubljana, Trieste, Pula and Rijeka, as well as Sušak, Bakar, Čabar, Kastav and Krk.

On 21 September, Völker had appointed Riccardo Gigante as Extraordinary Commissioner for the Province of Carnaro, but he resigned after a few days, giving way to Alessandro Spalatin and then abstaining from active politics. Gino Sirola, appointed podestà of Fiume by the German authorities on 9 February 1944, tried to gain consensus for the reborn Fascist Party, whose role remained completely marginal.

At 11.30 a.m. on January 7, 1944, there was the first Anglo-American aerial bombardment of Rijeka. Another 27 followed until 19 April 1945; the victims were more than a hundred and the port and industrial facilities were destroyed by 80%.

On January 30, 1944, the Nazis set fire to the great Synagogue of Rijeka and began the mass deportation of the Jews of Rijeka: 243 people were deported, who, after passing through the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, almost all ended up in Auschwitz and of them only 19 survived. Much has been written and discussed about a rescue plan for Jews from Rijeka and those coming from Croatia organized by Commissioner Giovanni Palatucci, regent of the Rijeka Police Headquarters in 1944. Without a doubt, Palatucci was involved in anti-Nazi activity: on September 13, 1944, he was arrested and deported to Dachau where he died on February 10, 1945.

Between 1944 and 1945 partisan actions and German reprisals multiplied in the surroundings of Rijeka. The practice of inhibiting is also documented for the province of Carnaro: four foibe have been identified on Mount Učka and two in the localities of Grobnico and Kostrena, where the parish priest of Sušak, Fr. Martin Bubanj, was also thrown. German reprisals were ferocious: on April 30, 1944 in the village of Lipa, near Rijeka, more than 220 civilians were shot, including women, old people and children, out of a total population of 490 inhabitants.

In March 1945, with the Soviets and Americans aiming at Berlin from the east and west, Germany’s hour of defeat was near. Even in Rijeka the signs of crumbling were increasingly widespread. Already in July 1944 exponents of Rijeka fascism – including Giuseppe Gerini, co-director of the newspaper La Vedetta d’Italia, Giuseppe Marras, president of the Institute of Fascist Culture, and the writer Osvaldo Ramous – had begun to collaborate with the MPL. On 18 April 1945 Raoul Sperber, second lieutenant of the Alpini, was shot by the Germans for having planned to cross with a group of his Alpini alongside the Italian partisans fighting in the MPL.

At the end of April the partisans launched the final attack and at ten in the morning of May 3, 1945 they began to descend from the suburb of Drenova and took possession of the city. The citizens’ uprising planned by the Popular Liberation Committee did not occur.

The new power was organized around the People’s Committee (CPC) headed by Pietro Klausberger. The situation was firmly in the hands of the Yugoslav communists and the Italian communists from Rijeka acted within the Croatian Communist Party and its “transmission belts”, such as the Union of Italians of Istria and Rijeka (UIIF) and the Italian-Slavic Anti-Fascist Union (UAIS), while the secret police, the OZNA, was directed by Croatian militants such as Emil Karadžija known as Domaci and Oskar Piskulić.

In Yugoslavia, as in the other Eastern European countries liberated from the Soviet Union, the system of people’s democracy based on the single party, on the iron control of the press and above all on the omnipotence of the political police was rapidly being established.

In Rijeka only the autonomists, not compromised with fascism and still influential, could have created some problems for the new masters. During 1944 the Yugoslav communists had in fact tried to convince them to support the annexation of the city to Yugoslavia. Faced with their clear refusal, they had unleashed a violent campaign with leaflets (one read: “no German bunker will save you from our machine gun”) and articles in partisan newspapers.

The threats became reality immediately after May 3rd: already in the morning of the next day news began to circulate of raids by the OZNA in several houses and summary liquidations. On May 3, the autonomist exponents Nevio Skull, Giuseppe Sincich and Zanella’s right-hand man Mario Blasich were killed who, disabled, was strangled in his bed. Hundreds of people were arrested and disappeared into thin air: the former mayor Carlo Colussi with his wife Nerina Copetti, the teacher Margherita Dumicich Sennis and his daughter Gigliola, the anti-fascist republican Angelo Adam, taken in December 1945 with his wife and daughter, Gino Sirola, brought back to Fiume from Trieste and then disappeared, and many others. Croatian Fiumani, such as Radoslav Baucer, administrative director of the Civil Hospital, were also liquidated or disappeared. Riccardo Gigante was taken from his home in Rijeka and killed in Kastav on May 4 along with a dozen Italians, including the marshal of finance Vito Butti and the former D’Annunzio legionnaire Nicola Marzucco.

There were roundups of fascists or presumed fascists, police officers, carabinieri and financiers: at least 89 members of the Police Headquarters, 50 of the Finance, 11 carabinieri and 93 soldiers of the RSI were deported to an unknown destination and probably ended up in the foibe of Grobnico and Kostrena.

The repression was part of an overall plan of preventive purge promoted by the communist authorities in the territories of Venezia Giulia and throughout Yugoslavia. A precise quantification of the number of victims throughout Venezia Giulia is, for several reasons, very difficult. Most historians currently agree on a minimum number of 4,000-5,000 victims (of which about 600 can be ascribed to the “Istrian foibe” of 1943).

The summary liquidations ended in the late autumn of 1945 also due to international pressure (on 23 June Churchill had protested against the cruelties committed against the Italians, especially in Trieste and Fiume) and on 30 October the People’s Tribunals came into operation alongside the Military Tribunals. Thus began the second phase of repression, conducted by “legal” means: numerous sentences were issued condemning forced labor and confiscating property, and some death sentences. The few public trials had a clear political meaning of “warning” and posthumous trials were set up against people already liquidated as Angelo Adam.

The qualification of enemy of the people was used so widely as to include any opponent, even a potential one, and a fundamental role was played by informing, openly encouraged by the authorities even anonymously.

The purge also affected the workplaces – the Shipyards, the Torpedo and ROMSA Shipyards, the schools – where during assemblies of “criticism and self-criticism”, according to a script well tested in the Stalinist Soviet Union, several workers were pilloried accused of “reactionary propaganda”, “sabotage” and so on.

Religious holidays and teaching were suppressed. Religious persecution swept across Yugoslavia and Croatian Catholicism was particularly affected: the archbishop of Zagreb Alojzije Stepinac, opposed to Tito’s communist regime, was accused of collaborationism and sentenced in September 1946 to 16 years of forced labor in a carefully constructed trial whose sentence was declared null and void in 2016 by the Zagreb District Court.

In Rijeka, the persecution had its most sensational episode in the destruction of the Church of the Redeemer, which was mined and blown up on November 4, 1949. The statue of the Madonna on the cliff of Opatija was torn down. Catholic associations and the diocesan press were banned. The bishop of Fiume Ugo Camozzo, branded as an “enemy of the people”, had to leave the city.

The overall balance of the repression in Rijeka is traced by Ballarini in the “Historical Profile” prefaced to the fundamental work The victims of Italian nationality in Rijeka and surroundings (1939-1947), published by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities in 2002:

in Rijeka, at the hands of the military and the secret police […], under the directives of the Croatian Communist Party […], with the direct or indirect complicity of the citizens’ People’s Committee […], no less than 500 people of Italian nationality lost their lives between 3 May and 31 December 1947. To these we should add an unspecified number of ‘disappeared’ (no less than a hundred) whom the lack of name control in the municipal historical register forces us to relegate to anonymity together with the substantial number, in the villages of the province of Carnaro and the districts annexed after 1941, of victims of Croatian nationality (who often had, at least between 1940 and 1943, Italian citizenship) determined at the end of the war by the Yugoslav communist regime.

Column of deportees in Trieste in 1945

Yugoslav occupation of Rijeka 1945

Icilio Bacci

On July 29, 1946, the Peace Conference opened in Paris; The Italian delegation was admitted without the right to vote and to make proposals.

Riccardo Zanella, who returned to Rome at the end of May 1945 from France, where he had participated in the Resistance, tried to re-propose the solution of the Free State for Rijeka, referring to the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920. In contact with the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, he set up the Fiume Office in Rome. His battle had some international resonance, but did not lead to any results.

With the Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947, Italy lost Istria, Fiume and Zara; as far as Trieste is concerned, the establishment of a sort of independent state was envisaged, the Free Territory of Trieste (FTT), divided into a zone A (with Trieste) and a zone B (a strip of western Istria with Koper and Buje) under military administration, respectively, allied and Yugoslav. The FTT never came into operation: on 5 October 1954 zone A returned to Italian sovereignty following an international agreement and on 10 November 1975 zone B was definitively ceded to Yugoslavia with the Treaty of Osimo.

Italy was only allowed to make the signing of the Treaty subject to ratification by the Constituent Assembly. Very few voices were raised to protest against the territorial cessions on the eastern border. Only the anti-fascist Leo Valiani did so with clarity and passion, who said in his speech:

The Italian territories that are to be ceded to Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia has already annexed […]; the Italians of Fiume and Pazin are already considered and treated as Yugoslav citizens, unless they escape, unless they leave clandestinely, abandoning their possessions. I believe that I do not need to demonstrate, like Giuliano, what this Treaty represents for us, for my own, in particular in its clauses that wound us in the flesh. […] Unfortunately, the Treaty has steadily deteriorated since it was first discussed in London in 1945. From the ethnic beginning, the whole of Istria was annexed to Yugoslavia.

Already after the arrival of the Yugoslav army, the exodus of Italians began in the occupied territories, which took on increasingly impressive dimensions in the following years. In the fifties Tito declared: “we got rid of 300,000 Italians“! This figure can be accepted on the whole, even if it appears that several people, for various reasons, did not register as refugees, escaping any verification. In any case, the massive nature of the exodus comes to light by looking at the figures in percentages: about 90% of the Italian population abandoned the territories ceded to Yugoslavia. The exodus of the Istrians, Rijeka and Dalmatians constitutes a historical break that has no precedent. In the first post-war period and in the Fascist period, for example, despite fascist repression, there had been no massive exodus of Slavs from Italy to Yugoslavia. The exodus of Italians from Istria, Rijeka and Zadar after the Second World War, on the other hand, overwhelmed an entire national group, irreversibly distorting the ethnic and cultural physiognomy of the territories they had inhabited for centuries.

The exodus was not caused by an expulsion decree, it was a spontaneous and at the same time not voluntary phenomenon, a de facto expulsion. It should be seen as a response to the organic repressive design of the new totalitarian power, which identified above all the Italians, lukewarm or hostile towards the new regime, as the “enemies of the people” to be hit and made politically and culturally irrelevant.

The exodus to Rijeka began in 1945 and intensified after the signing of the Peace Treaty, extending until the early fifties. Out of a population that in 1942 amounted to 45,830 units, 42,580 people were missing from the Yugoslav census of 1961. The exodus involved about 90% of the residents. The Peace Treaty provided that Italians in the territories annexed to Yugoslavia could opt for the preservation of Italian citizenship and move compulsorily to Italy. After 1947, the Yugoslav authorities, worried about the unforeseen dimensions of the exodus, began to reject applications for options; in Fiume 2,000 were rejected.

Despite the harsh repression, in the two-year period 1945-1947 there were some episodes of open resistance to the new regime in Rijeka: individual actions – such as that of the young worker Giuseppe Librio shot down by the burst of machine gun fire from a Yugoslav soldier on 16 October 1945 for having lowered, together with two comrades, the Yugoslav flag from one of the flagpoles in Piazza Dante – and actions of organized groups, among which the “young autonomists” or “Visinko group“, from the name of their main exponent, the “Catholic group” or “Father Nestor’s group” and the “Maltauro group” should be remembered. They were all discovered and sentenced to very harsh prison sentences.

Starting in 1945, a systematic policy of destroying the centuries-old Italian history of Rijeka was promoted under the pretext of fighting the fascist remnants. The odonomastics were progressively reset, Croatized and “communized”, the centuries-old city symbols were abolished: the banner, replaced by a strange white-blue flag, and the Leopoldine coat of arms, the double-headed eagle, removed from the Civic Tower because it was considered a “fascist” symbol. Emblematic of this Orwellian fury, in addition to the aforementioned destruction of the Church of the Redeemer, is the organized disappearance in 1945 of the marble bust of Antonio Grossich, patriot and scientist, erected in 1930 in the Regina Margherita Park (now Nikola Host Park). That bust is currently in the Municipal Museum of Rijeka and may perhaps regain its place in the future, confirming that history often re-emerges after hiding, like a karst river.

Julian delegation in Paris September 1946

The history of Rijeka can be considered to have ended in the years immediately following the great exodus, the voids of which were filled by massive immigration. Rijeka became Rijeka definitively. Emblematic was the union of the city with nearby Sušak with the disappearance of the bridge over the Eneo, which over the centuries had, on the one hand, separated Rijeka from Croatia and, on the other, connected two peoples who had always been involved in an uninterrupted process of mutual exchanges and “contaminations”.

Rijeka, which in 1942 had 45,830 souls, of which Croats and other Slavs made up about 20%, today has 175,000 inhabitants, of whom only 2,500 declared themselves Italians in the 2011 Croatian census, less than 1.5% of the total population.

In the early years after the Second World War, another story began or, rather, several other stories began: the history of the reception of Julian-Dalmatian exiles in Italy and in the world, the history of the exiles’ associations in Italy and in the world and the history of Italians in the former Yugoslavia and today in the republics of Croatia and Slovenia. And last but certainly not least, the history of the Croatian city of Rijeka-Rijeka from 1945 to the present day, in which the Italian presence has become a minority.

With regard to the exiles , the Italian government took care to avoid their concentration – which could have created political problems – not only in Trieste, but also in other places, dispersing them in 109 refugee camps scattered throughout the peninsula. There were three partial exceptions: the Julian-Dalmatian Village in Rome with about 2,000 exiles, the Julian settlements of Fertilia in Sardinia (about 600 exiles) and the Trieste Village in Latina (about 1,000 exiles). At the same time, a welfare policy was promoted entrusted from 1949 to the Opera per l’assistenza ai rifugiati giuliani e dalmati, which had Oscar Sinigaglia as its first president and was then directed until its dissolution in 1978 by Aldo Clemente.

Associating in order not to dissolve one’s identity and not to forget: this is the origin of the associationism of the Julian-Dalmatian exiles in Italy and in the world. Several Julian Committees arose since 1943 and in the following years in various Italian cities, some of which gave life on June 22, 1948 to the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Zara, which, having become the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia (ANVGD) in October 1949, also had an efficient Assistance Office directed by the Franciscan Flaminio Rocchi.

As far as Rijeka is concerned, it should be remembered the reconstitution in Rome on 27 November 1960 of the Society of Rijeka Studies by some exiled Rijeka intellectuals (Attilio Depoli, Enrico Burich, Giorgio Radetti, Gian Proda and Vincenzo Brazzoduro) and the establishment in 1964 in the heart of the former Giuliano Dalmata Village at the EUR of the Historical Museum Archive of Rijeka (AMSF), recognized as being of “exceptional historical interest” in 1972 by the Ministry of Education and cultural institution of the exodus from the law of 30 March 2004 establishing the “Day of Remembrance”. In the sixties of the last century, the associations of the Free Municipalities in exile of the lost cities arose. The Free Municipality of Rijeka in exile – today AFIM – Associazione Fiumani Italiani nel Mondo – was established in 1966 and had Ruggero Gherbaz as its first mayor; its press organ is still the periodical La Voce di Fiume.

The Yugoslav communist regime guaranteed the Italian minority a series of rights and tools, the exercise of which, however, was subject to the strict control of the Party. The Italian minority was represented by the Union of Italians of Istria and Rijeka (UIIF), hit by purges every time its leaders tried to operate independently, it had (and has) the publishing house EDIT, which still publishes two periodicals in Italian, the monthly Panorama and the daily La Voce del popolo, to which must be added the cultural magazine La battana born in Rijeka in 1964, as well as the Italian programs of RTV Koper. An important role was played in the years of the regime by the “Dramma Italiano di Fiume”, an Italian-language prose company. Finally, the Rovinj Historical Research Centre, established on 12 February 1969, should be mentioned, which over the years has promoted numerous important studies and researches.

In 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consequent rapid implosion of communist regimes in Eastern countries marked a radical turning point. In Yugoslavia there was a radical change in the organization of the minority, which had to deal immediately with the proclamation of the independence of Slovenia, in December 1990, and of Croatia, in June 1991, and with the war that followed from 1991 to 1995. On July 16, 1991, the old UIIF was replaced by the Italian Union, the new democratic body of the minority, and the red star disappeared from the banner and official documents. The change extended to all the other institutions of the minority, starting with the Italian-language press.

With the end of the Yugoslav communist regime , a relationship began to develop, previously almost non-existent, between the exiles and the minority of those who remained and also between the Italian exiles and the Croats and the Slovenes, now represented by democratic governments that aspired to enter the European Union (which happened in 2004 for Slovenia and in 2013 for Croatia).

The first to promote an official dialogue with the remaining Italians and with the authorities of the Croatian majority were the associations of Rijeka exiles, followed a few years later by most of the others. Since 1989, when the Yugoslav state still existed, the Society of Rijeka Studies, in agreement with the Free Municipality of Rijeka in exile, sent a delegation to the city of origin. In the current historical conditions, the Italian cultural identity of Rijeka, as well as of the other lost lands, can and must be defended and enhanced jointly by the exiles and those who remained together with the Croatian institutions starting from the Muncipality of Rijeka-Rijeka.

Since 1989, several initiatives have been carried out in Rijeka and significant results have been achieved. It should be remembered, first of all, the research on the victims of Italian nationality in the former Italian province of Carnaro in the period 1939-1947: promoted by the Society of Rijeka Studies and the Croatian Institute for History, it ended in 2002 with the publication of the bilingual volume (Italian and Croatian), edited by Amleto Ballarini and Mihael Sobolevski, The victims of Italian nationality in Rijeka and surroundings 1939-1947 published by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. An important recognition then came from the Rijeka Municipality which on 10 May 2016 awarded the “Golden Plaque-City of Rijeka” to the then president of the Society of Rijeka Studies Amleto Ballarini “for his many years of commitment to promoting dialogue and the image of the city of Rijeka”.

In recent years, the municipality of Rijeka-Rijeka has decided to remember the head of the Autonomous Party of Rijeka Riccardo Zanella in the odonomastics, has decided to relocate the double-headed Rijeka eagle on the top of the Civic Tower and has placed in the Old Town a series of tables with the list of historical names of the streets and squares as a partial recovery of the forgotten history of the city.

Rijeka continues to live in present-day Rijeka and after the totalitarian devastation the traces of its ancient face begin to become recognizable.

Laterina refugee camp (Arezzo)

Life in refugee camps

G. Stelli,

History of Rijeka from its origins to our days,

Pordenone 2017, Biblioteca dell’Immagine (with extensive bibliography)