Slovenian Trieste

 This article first appeared in TOTAL SLOVENIA NEWS on 4 August 2020.

                                     

By what convoluted route did an Australian come to write an historical novel about Slovenian Trieste? It’s a long story.

Asking my birth mother Silvana (1920-2020) for her family history was like getting blood out of a stone and, when at last she began to reminisce about her earliest days in Istria at the age of 90, it was a race against time to record it. Nevertheless, I discovered that her father came from Trieste and her maternal grandmother, Marija Matiasić, had run away from a village in Slovenia aged 16 sometime in the 1870’s. I began to write His Most Italian City so that these memoirs might not be lost, in the process uncovering the history of Slovenian Trieste that ran parallel to it.

In common with Sydney, where I come from, ports are multicultural places and in my novel I have drawn Trieste this way. It is a city perched at the crossroads of Slav, Latin and Germanic peoples and, before World War One, served as the port of Vienna. Half its population spoke a dialect of Venetian, like my mother, and the Slovenes, who made up one quarter, were the largest ethnic minority. When I wrote on page 117 of the novel that ‘half his friends came from mixed marriages,’ you can easily see this ethnic diversity in the nineteenth century marriage records of Trieste. 

‘Repressed by Austria no more! Viva l’Italia!’- page 65. Austrian tolerance of multiculturalism was a threat to an Italy only recently united, and deeply resented by its intellectuals and politicians who had been the driving forces of the Risorgimento. Declaring themselves the inheritors of ancient Rome, they envisaged an Italian Empire, and developed a movement involving land claims where Italian ethnic or language groups lived, called ‘irredentism’. Its definition varied from reasonable to extreme. For example, in the novel my Istrian grandmother Dolores is half Slovenian and half Croatian, speaks Venetian but considers herself Italian. If a town contained enough people like her (or even if it didn’t) an irredentist might claim that the town was Italian. For the Slovenes in Trieste the movement signified that irredentists considered Austrian Trieste to be ‘unredeemed Italy’.

Piazza Oberdan by Boris Pahor begins by chronicling the growth of the irredentist movement in Trieste and its effects on the Slovenian population. The book is the collected memoirs and stories of a particular place at a particular time by an author who was frequently an eye witness. It is essential reading for anyone who is interested in Slovenian Trieste. Unfortunately, I could only find it in German and Slovenian. (Translators, please note: when can we expect an English edition?)

 ‘The Irredentist movement became particularly significant in Trieste after 1870’ with the Italian occupation of Rome and the Vatican. ‘The Irredentists so strongly influenced public opinion that gradually the citizens began to give way to it… This was not in harmony with the Slovene population….The irredentists, therefore, turned their attention to the Slovene middle class and often provoked clashes between Trieste citizens of Slovenian descent and Italian agitators.  

 ‘Apart from the fact that they wanted to shake off German dominance, the Italian nationalists had an additional motive for connecting the city to Italy: resistance to the economic and cultural growth of the Slovenian people. Although this population had been an integral part of the city for twelve centuries, it consisted of peasants in the suburbs, but in the city itself it consisted of carters, waterside workers, cooks, nurses, masons, labourers, and small merchants…In 1848, as in Vienna, so in Trieste, people demanded the recognition of their Slovenian identity, and so gradually began to form a Slovenian middle class.

[The construction of the Narodni Dom in 1904] ‘was a great provocation to the anti-Slovenian Italian agitators, accustomed to seeing the Slovene community composed of small karst farmers, dairy maids, housewives and labourers. When, after the end of the war, Rome seized control of the city and its surroundings, the Narodni Dom became one of the main targets of the hate that had hitherto been suppressed.’

Pahor records its destruction.

‘On that afternoon of July 13, 1920, the sky had turned blood red before sunset, and at the same time we learned of the fire… we ran downhill in the direction of those dull voices that came up from the piazza. We were actually witnesses of the events when we stopped at the corner in front of the coffee house Fabris. Everything in front of us was as if it were on a stage: that screaming crowd, over which the flames were zipping out of the windows of the Narodni Dom. We were shocked, held each other's hands, and stared at the firefighters. The attackers refused to allow them to direct their streams of water at the burning building… I probably wondered, as was the case later, why this fire, what was this crowd, this assault on the fire hoses, so that the water did not shoot up but poured itself on the ground? I learned later that people from within the Narodni Dom had doused it with petrol from the barracks, and that two people had jumped out of a hotel room onto the street.’

 In what has been termed ‘Trieste’s Kristallnacht’, a great deal of other Slovenian property in the city was also attacked. 

 Pahor continues, ‘As the editor of the newspaper Il Piccolo, Rino Alessi, put it in his article “Trieste has placed itself at the head of fascism.”’ He goes on to detail the violence towards the Slovenian community in Trieste and in the Slovenian territory given to Italy after World War One.

 In order to record a balanced judgement, it’s important to put this historical period into context. Fuelled by misinterpreted Darwinism, racism was in vogue not only in Germany and Italy, but even in Britain. This meant that, in response to Italian demands at the secret Treaty of London, which in 1915 brought Italy into the war, Britain had few qualms about incorporating one third of small Slavic Slovenia into an enormous Italy already on the brink of Fascism. After the war, the single voice for the national self-determination of the Slavs was Woodrow Wilson of the US who addressed this issue in his Fourteen Point Plan. Unfortunately his suggestions were ignored and Mussolini, who was shortly to take up office, was a vocal anti-Slav racist. What followed were the ravages of Fascism as it stretched its tentacles far and wide.

The best referenced article I have read about this time was written by Gianfranco Cresciani. ‘A clash of civilizations? The Slovene and Italian minorities and the problem of Trieste.’ Italian Historical Society, Australia. Volume 12, No. 2 July-December 2004.  

Dr Cresciani writes: within Trieste and Istria the Fascist regime ‘progressively shut down most Slovene or Croat institutions. Between 1918 and 1928, 488 primary schools were closed, as well as some 400 cultural, sporting, youth, social and professional organizations and libraries, three political parties, 31 newspapers and journals, and 300 co-operatives and financial institutions.’ 

One day when Silvana was 97, we were out for a walk when suddenly she said, ‘My father was very unhappy. The government wanted to move him all over Italy.’ This was Romano Tonon (1886 -1956), born in Trieste of an Italian mother and a Venetian father, but apparently limited in his career choices because he was educated in Graz rather than Italy. On page 138 of the novel, my great uncle (1896 – 1984), who was Slovenian and Croatian and also educated in Austria, was denied promotion at the University of Florence. Silvana deplored the discrimination he suffered. She mentioned it on many occasions. I have a photograph of Zio Lin, as she called him, still lecturing about a mosquito that attacked olives at retirement age. In 1928 his family’s name was Italianised. The original Italian in the birth register reads: ‘Il controscritto cognome di Micatovich è stato corretto a quello di Di Micheli con decreto del Prefetto di Pola.’ ‘The countersigned surname Micatovich has been corrected to that of Di Micheli with the decree of the Prefect of Pola’ – page 18 of the novel. In the same register a further round of Italianizing Slavic names occurred in 1933.

I believe that any article about Slovenian Trieste needs a reference to Britain. There are several of these in the novel. ‘Britain, in particular, will back Italy as harmless if it serves British interests’ – page 24. ‘Istria was given to Italy after the war by the winners because the Italians asked for it, and to reward it for fighting on their side’ - page 174.

In 1923 King George V ‘conferred upon Mussolini the insignia of the Order of the Bath and congratulated the country for emerging from its recent crisis “under the wise leadership of a strong man of government”’.  (Fascist Voices by Christopher Duggan, Vintage 2012.) And according to my father-in-law, who was an Australian soldier in Italy between 1942 and 1945, it was fear of the communism of the Italian Partisans (not Yugoslav) that led Britain to approve of General Badoglio as Prime Minister following Mussolini because, despite his Fascist war crimes, he was anti-communist. Douglas Walker received the Certificato al Patriota for his work with the Italian Partisans but he continually stressed the importance to the Allies of stabilizing Italy.

Lastly, Trieste Goes to Australia by Gianfranco Cresciani (Padana Press, 2011) documents the fate of so many Slovenians in Trieste when the city was returned to Italy in 1954 after nearly a decade of being a free port under Allied occupation. Particularly poignant are the photographs of the Audace Pier crowded with thousands of forced emigrants, ten percent of Trieste’s population. After their departure, depression fell upon the city. 

Today is a time for understanding and healing between two nations. Italy has thirty times the population of Slovenia, and at least that number again living around the world claim Italian heritage. We are far enough removed from Mussolini for these Italians who may not know of his excesses to study them objectively. So my last words will come from an Italian:  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child – Cicero.

How to Write an Action Scene – DIY or blow-by-blow?

I confess to being terrified of writing action scenes, although I love reading them. When my publisher Penmore Press sent me out the PDF Book Block of His Most Italian City for proof reading I nearly fell over backwards when I read my own attempt that had given me such labour and angst. It actually sounded like a real action scene. I wrote to my editor expressing my amazement but, I have to confess (again), writing one now still fills me with dread and anticipation (the bad sort of anticipation that leaves you awake night after night replaying the moves in your head and finding nothing but faults). Writing the next book Through Forests and Mountains that will come out in 2021, I decided to do the DIY technique: perform the action yourself then rush home and write it up before you have forgotten the chill mists, the pounding heart and the taut manoeuvres. 

We live about two hundred metres from the Australian bush, a pretty menacing place after dark. Often I had walked down long after the sun had set in an attempt to persuade myself to venture just five more metres into its black embrace, before turning and fleeing back to the comfort of the street lights lest I be eaten by wolves, bears and other things that don’t exist in Australia. (There’s always yowies, I suppose. Haven’t seen too many of them recently.) We had lived in the house for over twenty years by this stage and, confronted by the possibility that I would die here and never go for a scary bush walk at night, I persuaded my nephew, who was living with us at the time, to go with me. I was at the point of writing a similar scene in the novel and needed it to be realistic. 

My nephew said we had to take the dog – he weighs thirty-five kilograms and his bark packs quite a punch - so I saddled him up and off we went. Well, to cut a long story short, the three of us went on two bush walks at night, one during the full moon and one two weeks later, because I wanted to be able to write about the differences. The bush was suitably spooky, enjoyably ominous and the trip enabled me to write several hundred realistic words each time. You have to do this straight away, and don’t rationalize it too much. Turn your brain off. Just translate the experience into words and fix up the mistakes later. That’s the Do-It-Yourself method and it works really well. I have also tried it out sailing and created a thousand action-packed and water-logged words without a single neurone helping me.

The blow-by-blow technique, by contrast, requires research and a great deal of imagination. Also it takes much longer, because you have to keep returning to the work week after week to correct the inevitable errors. This is what I had to do in His Most Italian City, never having had the opportunity to submerge in a World War One submarine. There are a few basic maritime expressions, like port and starboard, bow and stern, that you’ve got to understand for starters. Also, don’t think nuclear submarines. These early subs were basically boats that had the ability to submerge and there was even much argument about that. The Austrian U1 that I had originally been using, stopped, flooded and only then sank. Obviously it would be no good in a chase scene. I decided on the U27 because it was the most successful Austrian submarine. This boat pushed down into the water as it went using the hydroplanes, and it could achieve this in under thirty seconds. Perfect!

So the point of the chase scene in the novel is that a powerful motor boat must try to sink a small submarine by swamping it. This was achievable because the U27 had saddle-like tanks on each side that made it roll a lot on the surface. What you want to do is to make it roll over so far that enough water will get in, threatening to sink it. This was forever happening to those submarines. They would simply disappear and never be seen again. They were quite unstable and you had to keep your forces balanced. This is why the submarine in Das Boot sank. It became unbalanced. Whether you could get them to resurface was the question. 

I decided that the U27 had to submerge to escape the motorboat, but it was being chased out of the harbour and the depth of water at the entrance was only thirty-five metres. After that it went down fairly steeply. The submarine itself was thirty-seven metres long. If the submarine crash-dives at an angle of thirty degrees (the maximum possible) how deep does the water have to be to avoid a collision with the ocean floor? Enter trigonometry. (Don’t laugh, I actually did this.) 

Now, as you might suspect, all this took a long time to get right. You also have to get the sequencing correct, and the reactions of the characters must be believable. More than that, it took a lot of soul searching, internal life to make it readable and exciting. Hence my pleasure at the final result. 

I guess if you are writing fantasy, or something that you couldn’t research or employ the DIY technique, it would be a major feat of imagination. I was wondering to myself the other day why Wuthering Heights has become a contemporary cult classic when it didn’t slot at all into middle Victorian sensibilities. The answer, of course, is that it is a fantasy novel. Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s fantasy world of Gondal. 

So, to finish, here is a quote about Wuthering Heights in praise of imagination in writing action scenes. 

‘If the rank of a work of fiction is to depend solely on its naked imaginative power, then this is one of the greatest novels in the language.’ – G W Peck. American Review, June 1848.

 

Amazon.com: His Most Italian City (9781946409942): Walker, Margaret: Books

Through Forests and Mountains - Kindle edition by Walker, Margaret. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

A SUBMARINE IN TRIESTE

THE ADOPTED PERSON'S GUIDE TO ISTRIA

    I had no interest in modern Italy nor the Italian diaspora that has produced restaurants in almost every city on earth. My adoptive mother and father were proud colonial Australians. They didn't go to restaurants. They went to the cricket. They caught fish, and their parents referred to Yugoslavs as Balts even though Yugoslavia was nowhere near the Baltic.

    Discovering herself overnight the parent of a very large baby, my mother accordingly brought me up on a mixture of Australian oral history and stories of the female Yugoslav Partisans. I thought they were thrilling, and I just knew that my birth mother had hurled grenades at fascists. Yugoslavia seemed a wonderful place to me and, when I spent two weeks there in 1985, I settled as naturally into its lakes and forests as if I had taken root.

    So, when I met my brother in 2002 and his first words were ‘my mother is Italian,’ I was less than impressed. (I recall that my half-Italian husband and I may have differed on this.) My sister’s children also told me, ‘Nonna is Italian.' They retrieved a stack of postcards from a dusty shelf addressed to Silvana Di Micheli Tonon.

​

    ‘Di Micheli is her mother’s name,’ they said.

   Well, I had met my biological mother in 1989 and I knew better.

​​​

   'Silvana told me that her mother's name was Micatovich.'  

   I produced my adoption papers and tapped 'Yugoslavian' prominently.

     ​​​

   ‘Italian,’ they replied.

     

   ‘Yugoslavian,’ I said.

​

​    Welcome to Istria.

​

     Silvana was born in Tar, an Istrian hilltop village, in 1920. She took her holidays in nearby Novigrad. Trieste was her city. Following the war, having been Italian for a brief 25 years and Austrian before that, Tar became part of Yugoslavia. In its park, on the cenotaph beneath the partisan star, is an inscription in Croatian and Italian written in 1952, 'This stone is erected as a sign of gratitude to the Croatian and Italian fighters of this community. Casualties for the liberation of our people.'

  

    But Silvana never went back. She was Australian from the minute she stepped off the ship in 1950 and her family, growing up without oral history, were left to their own devices in deciding where she came from. Then one day, when she was nearly 90, she began to reminisce about her childhood. My sister, scribbling furtively, recorded as much as she could, and this is how I discovered that, when her parents took on Italian identity after the war, Silvana herself decided to become Yugoslavian.

​

    What she ultimately related did not amount to a book, but it was enough to bring the past to life and to create the story world for the novel. When she and I read a book together that my brother had bought her about Novigrad, called ‘Cittanova D’Istria,’ it encouraged further memories.

​

    ‘Mandracchio?? ' she exclaimed, thumping the page. (She was 97.) 'Ha, ha, ha! Mandracio, please, not mandracchio. And see those Venetian walls!’ More thumping. ‘They’re to keep the Turks out. People in Cittanova would say to one another, "I’m not a Turk!"’

    And finally a few quotes to shed light on that troubling Yugoslav/Italian question:

​​​

   ‘I like Italian culture but I don’t like Italians. Italians are distrustful because they have been invaded too many times.'
   ​'My father was very unhappy. The government wanted to move him all over Italy.'

​   ‘I saw Mussolini with Hitler in a car in Florence. I was surprised how small he was.'

​​   ‘I felt displaced in Italy.’

   ‘Micatovich was an important name in our village. It was the name of an island down the far south coast near Albania.'

​   ‘My grandmother came from a village near the Austrian border.' 

   'We were Austrian, then Austria lost the war. Then we were Italian, and Italy lost the war!'

​

    My own feeling is that Silvana thought of herself in regional terms, not national. She was Istrian and the mixture of cultures that that implies. ​I fancy that nationality is a modern invention.