Biographical notes

Industrialist and politician, he was born in Rijeka in 1876, the son of the Rijeka industrialist Luigi Ossoinack. After completing his lower secondary education in his hometown, he attended the Academy of Commerce in Bratislava and later the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Defender of Rijeka autonomy within Austria-Hungary but in opposition to his fellow citizen Riccardo Zanella, he joined the Autonomous League, becoming an unelected member of the Hungarian Diet in Budapest in 1916. At the end of the First World War, he proposed the right to self-determination for his city and on 30 October 1918 he founded an "Italian National Council" chaired by Antonio Grossich to claim the annexation of Rijeka to Italy, thus opposing a "Croatian National Council" which asked for the annexation of the city to the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

In 1919 he participated as a member of the Rijeka Peace Conference in Paris and on 3 March of the same year he was appointed "Representative of Rijeka" at the peace conference as the "last Rijeka deputy in the Hungarian parliament". During the peace conference he wrote a memorandum lashing out against the Habsburgs' policy of divide and rule. His memorandum and his meeting with the president of the United States on April 4, 1919, the day after the meeting with David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Georges Clemenceau did not then obtain the annexation of Fiume to Italy, instead Wilson's position continued to prevail.

In the same year he joined the Italian Regency of Gabriele D'Annunzio's Carnaro which then ended in 1920 with the Bloody Christmas. He was against the Free State of Rijeka led by his political opponent and autonomist Riccardo Zanella, continuing to propose the annexation of the city to Italy as a free port.

After the annexation of the city to Italy in 1924 following the Treaty of Rome, he retired from political life and started his business as an industrialist first in Rijeka and then in Luxembourg. He returned to Rijeka in 1939, remaining there until shortly after the Yugoslav occupation of 1945, and then decided to move to Venice, being a very active member among the Julian exiles. In the last years of his life he had moved to Merano, where he died in 1965. In recent years he has written "Atto d'accusa" (Monciatti ed., Trieste, 1960) in which he has collected the documents of his last political activity.