Il confine — The Border

1945–1954: the Free Territory, the foibe and the exodus

After the Second World War, the region around Trieste was disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia. From 1947 to 1954 the city and its surroundings formed the Free Territory of Trieste, divided into a zone under Allied military government (including the city) and a zone under Yugoslav administration; in 1954 most of the first zone returned to Italy and the second remained with Yugoslavia, a settlement confirmed by treaty in 1975. Two histories intersect here, and both are taught as fact. During and after the war, in 1943 and especially in 1945, thousands of people in Venezia Giulia and Istria — mainly Italians, though not only — were killed by Yugoslav forces, some thrown into the karst sinkholes called foibe; estimates of the number vary widely and remain debated. Between the end of the war and the mid-1950s, between roughly 250,000 and 350,000 people, most of them Italians, left Istria, Fiume (Rijeka) and Dalmatia — the exodus; the city of Pola (Pula) emptied almost entirely in early 1947. At the same time, the region's Slovenes and Croats remember two decades of fascist persecution and the Italian occupation of parts of Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1943, marked by repression and internment. Memory remains divided, and the course does not judge between the accounts. Since 2004 Italy marks February 10 as the Day of Remembrance (Giorno del Ricordo) of the foibe and the exodus. A joint commission of Italian and Slovene historians worked from 1993 to 2000 and produced a shared report on relations between the two peoples from 1880 to 1956 — the kind of neutral, cited source Alex chooses for his translator's note. The word a translator chooses for those who left — exiles, refugees, displaced persons — is itself a choice of interpretation, which is why Alex lets the characters name themselves.