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Trieste: a short history of a border city
Trieste placed itself under the protection of the Habsburgs in 1382, and for more than five centuries it belonged to the Austrian lands. In 1719 it was made a free port, and in the nineteenth century it grew into the empire's main seaport and one of Europe's most international cities, with Italian, Slovene, German, Greek, Jewish, Serbian and other communities. At the end of the First World War, Italian troops landed on November 3, 1918, at the pier then called Molo San Carlo, renamed Molo Audace after the destroyer Audace; Italy annexed the city formally in 1920. Under fascism, the Slovene and Croatian minorities of the region were subjected to forced Italianization: their languages were removed from schools and public life, and many surnames were Italianized. In July 1920, before Mussolini came to power, fascists set fire to the Narodni dom, the Slovene cultural center in central Trieste. In September 1938, Mussolini announced the racial laws against Jews in a speech in Trieste's main square, now Piazza Unità d'Italia. In July 2020, the building of the Narodni dom was formally returned to the Slovene community, in a ceremony attended by the presidents of Italy and Slovenia. After 1945 came Yugoslav and then Allied administration, the Free Territory of Trieste (1947–1954), the city's return to Italy in 1954 and, in 1975, the treaty that settled the border. Ada's line — that for many Triestines confine means family rather than frontiera — reflects a region where families, languages and memories have long crossed a line drawn and redrawn on maps.