Trieste: presentation of the book “Terra irredenta, terra incognita” by Fabio Todero.

The volume Terra unredenta, terra incognita. The hour of arms on the eastern border of Italy 1914-1918 is presented by the author Fabio Todero, Wednesday 20 November at 17.30 pm in Sala Bazlen at Palazzo Gopcevich (Via Rossini 4), as part of the collateral activities of the exhibition “Vola Colomba. Triestine Calendar 1953-54”.

PhD in Italian Studies, researcher at the Regional Institute for the History of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age, Fabio Todero describes in his book the Adriatic irredentism in the First World War and tells the story of Venezia Giulia, which in the Italian national imagination was the unredeemed land par excellence.

The phenomenon of Irredentism has its conclusion in the tragic events of 1953 described in the exhibition at Palazzo Gopcevich thanks to the photographers Ugo Borsatti, Adriano de Rota, Gianni Anzalone, Livio Amstici and the photographic agency Giornalfoto.

"Few knew where Trieste was and what that mythical region was." - remember Frando Todero. "It was discovered by the millions of Italians who faced the war in the trenches of the Carso or on the peaks of the Julian Alps. An emblematic historical laboratory of the European context” – adds the author – “here different peoples lived together and experienced the conflict with contrasting spirits, especially when Italy decided to participate by breaking the Triple Alliance. The multi-ethnic Julian society had been involved since 1914: the mass mobilization saw tens of thousands of men leave in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army for places whose names are once again on the pages of newspapers today because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Italians, Slovenians and Croats from Venezia Giulia were sent to die in Serbia or Galicia. In the cities of the region, women, children and elderly people risked dying of hunger and had to deal with the consequences of total war, made even more severe in the spring of 1915 when military operations directly involved the territory.".

The book Terra irredenta, terra incognita. The hour of arms on the eastern border of Italy 1914-1918 offers the reader an overview of the war events in the Julian region, the involvement of men and women in the conflict, but above all the way in which these and the territory were described to contemporaries and to the post-war public. Memoirs, newspaper articles, diary and literary pages, songs, political reflection texts and images are used to tell, for the first time in an organic work, a key moment in the history of this multicultural area. Far from concluding its troubled history, the consequences of the Great War were at the basis of the subsequent new tragedies that would hit it with the Second World War.