(Excerpt from a longer article by Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella published in Corriere della Sera, June 17th, 2010)
Link to Part I
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[..] as the historic meeting at Trieste between Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and his Slovenian and Croatian counterparts Danilo Turk Ivo Josipovic demonstrates, something has begun to change. Enzo Bettiza - born in Spalato to an Italian father and a Slavic mother, and raised by a Serbian nanny who filled his head with tales of "the amazing duels between Marko Kraljevic and the Turk with three arrow-shooting heads" - wrote that the "time to forget a history that is among the cruellest and most oppressive between the jagged borders of Europe" may have finally arrived.
Undeniably, it is difficult to forget. For the Slavs, because after having long been fond of us (worth reading is Zdravka Krpina's "Italy in the eyes of Croats") they were forced to submit to unbearable nationalist injustices during the 20 years of Mussolini. And even moreso for us: 350,000 forced from Istria, the Quarnero and Dalmatia, according to the figures of Fr. Flaminio Rocchi, author of the book considered, correctly or not, as a sort of Gospel by the exiles; subjected to cruel acts of revenge in the final phases of the war, culminating in the murders of thousands; denied the right even to remember the Venetian and Italian culture and art in places that were called Cittanova, Albona, Rovigno, Capodistria, Umago...
Gianni Duiella, 82 years old, "Zaratino for a half-millennium," remembers well those years of laceration, when his family was split in two, between those who chose to leave everything to remain Italian and those who stayed, like himself: "Many Italians were made to 'disappear.' Without trial. It's true, here there are no Foibe and the communist partisans had to make do. So they tied a stone around their necks and threw them into the sea. As happened to Nicolò Luxardo, owner of the famous Maraschino factory, drowned off the island of Selve with his wife, Bianca. How many Italians were murdered in Zara remains unclear. Duiella thinks about 300. Coen guesses 500. Flaminio Rocchi writes of 900 killed [editor's note: by the time Tito's partisans entered Zara the city had already been reduced to ruins by a lengthy Anglo-American bombing campaign, and most of the population had already been forced into exile].
Nevertheless, the same Zaratine exiles, like Ottavio Missoni, Lucio Toth, Giorgio Varisco, would like to rebuild, once and for all, a decent and respectful relationship with the Croatians of today's Zara: "We can't continue throwing the wrongs we've done to one another in each other's faces for centuries: it serves no purpose. We must look forward, for the good of our grandchildren, for the good of our Zara." To clarify: nothing should be erased, as memory allows one to understand the errors of the past, so that they aren't repeated. But even if [former communist partisan and former secretary of the Italian Communist Party] Napolitano has acknowledged that there was "the aim of annexation on the part of the Slavs, which prevailed at the 1947 peace treaty talks and which assumed the sinister form of ethnic cleansing," it is necessary to move onward. Also because, as Paolo Mieli remembers, as recounted in Paolo Simoncelli's book "Zara, Two Sides of the Same Coin," about how the city was not awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour after the Allied bombings [translators note: every other city in Italy that suffered heavy bombing during the war was awarded the Medaglia d'oro al valore, Italy's highest military honour], the wrongdoing was not limited to one side.
Proof enough is the never-ending and torturous affair of reparations to exiles. The crux of the matter? Goods and property illegally confiscated after Marshall Tito siezed power were returned to their original owners after the breakup of the Socialist Republic. Naturally, it was difficult, for the new Slovenia and Croatia, who had decided to join Europe, espousing liberal values, to hold onto nationalized property.
The only ones not to have their property restored were the Italian exiles. Some defected illegally (some via Umago, or Bibione) while others were forced to sign away all their belongings before being allowed to emigrate. Taking for example, again, the story of the Luxardo family: their factory was perhaps the largest plant in Dalmatia, but the arrival of Tito's troops put an end to everything. The two oldest brothers, Pietro and Nicolò Luxardo, were killed, the factory destroyed by bombings. Maraschino, a famous liquor made with marasca cherries, survived, but in a new location at Torreglia, in the province of Padova, where the surviving family members had been forced to flee.
In the new, but shattered, Yugoslavia, the factory ended up in the hands of an Austrian of Slavic origins: [but under his ownership] it was a failure, so much so that he ended up distributing the shares of the new "Maraska" Company to the employees. Franco Luxardo narrates: "At a certain point we received a coded message: a sort of invitation to take the situation back in hand. But it proved impossible. Not least because of the difficulty of tracking down all the scattered shares, but also for a more concrete reason: we were producing more with only 30 employees [in Torreglia] than they could with 250."
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