Post by Diarist on Feb 23, 2016 13:46:17 GMT 1
Italy, in return for entering the Great War on the side of the Allied Powers, had been promised substantial territorial gains, which included the former Austrian Littoral and western Inner Carniola. Italy therefore annexed the city of Trieste at the war end, in accordance with the provisions of the 1915 Treaty of London and the Italian-Yugoslav 1920 Treaty of Rapallo. While only a few hundred Italians remained in the newly established South Slavic state, a population of half a million Slavs, of which the annexed Slovenes were cut off from the remaining three-quarters of total Slovene population at the time, were subjected to forced Italianization. Trieste had a large Italian majority, but it had more ethnic Slovene inhabitants than even Slovenia's capital of Ljubljana at the end of 19th century.
The Italian lower middle class - who felt most threatened by the city's Slovene middle class - sought to make Trieste a città italianissima, committing a series of attacks led by Black Shirts against Slovene-owned shops, libraries, and lawyers' offices, and even the Trieste National Hall, a central building to the Slovene community. By the mid-1930s several thousand Slovenes, especially members of the middle class and the intelligentsia from Trieste, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or to South America. Among the notable Slovene émigrés from Trieste were the author Vladimir Bartol, the legal theorist Boris Furlan and the Argentine architect Viktor Sulčič. The political leadership of the around 70,000 émigrés from the Julian March in Yugoslavia was mostly composed by Trieste Slovenes: Lavo Čermelj, Josip Vilfan and Ivan Marija Čok. Despite the exodus of the Slovene and German speakers, the city's population increased because of the migration of Italians from other parts of Italy. Several thousand ethnic Italians from Dalmatia also moved to Trieste from the newly created Yugoslavia.
In the late 1920s, resistance began with the Slovene militant anti-fascist organization TIGR, which carried out several bomb attacks in the city centre. In 1930 a trial of Slovene activists were held in Trieste by the fascist Special Tribunal for the Security of the State. During the 1920s and 1930s, several monumental building were built in the Fascist architectural style, including the impressive University of Trieste and the almost 70 m (229.66 ft) tall Victory Lighthouse (Faro della Vittoria), which became a city landmark. The economy improved in the 1930s, and several large infrastructure projects were carried out.
The Fascist government encouraged some of the artistic and intellectual subcultures that emerged in the 1920s and the city became home to an important avant-garde movement in visual arts, centered around the futurist Tullio Crali and the constructivist Avgust Černigoj. In the same period, Trieste consolidated its role as one of the centres of modern Italian literature, with authors such as Umberto Saba, Biagio Marin, Giani Stuparich, and Salvatore Satta. Intellectuals frequented the historic Caffè San Marco, still open today. Some non-Italian intellectuals remained in the city, such as the Austrian author Julius Kugy, the Slovene writer and poet Stanko Vuk, the lawyer and human rights activist Josip Ferfolja and the anti-fascist clergyman Jakob Ukmar.
Source: Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste#World_War_I.2C_annexation_to_Italy_and_the_Fascist_era