DINO MESSINA
ITALIANI DUE VOLTE

TO REMEMBER THE ITALIANS WHO WERE EXILES IN THEIR OWN LAND

The premise of this book is very clear: twice Italian are the three hundred thousand who were born Italian—and without ideological guilt or war crimes to their name—chose to remain so at the time of the Yugoslav occupation of Istria, Rijeka, and Dalmatia. All those who abandoned their homes, belongings, and their collective memory to not succumb to the oppression of those who considered them responsible—regardless of all evidence—of the atrocities committed by fascism. For those who lived through this tragedy firsthand or through direct family experience, it is a painful read. For the many who do not know, it will be an awakening to how convenient it was for a minority to pay for the entire nation's sins of a hateful war and an infamous regime. Thus, an important book because it takes us beyond the foibe: which remain unforgiven, just as the war crimes committed, like those of the Nazis, by Italian soldiers cannot be forgiven (notably the infamously known quotation by General Roatta who demanded a "head for a tooth" in the occupied Slovenia). And if we want to see beyond the tragedy of the foibe, the most instructive part of this book is the last chapters, those dedicated to the exodus. In fact, to the exoduses, as there were at least two or three waves of departures: the first two from Istria and coastal Dalmatia during the war, after September 8th, and then from Rijeka and Pula after the signing of the peace treaty of 1947, and the third from Zone B of Trieste after the London Memorandum of 1954. Regarding treaties, the one of Osimo is rightly remembered, which in 1975 bitterly closed the chapter of abandoned lands for the refugees. To realistically reach a conclusion where the generational change in Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia enables aspirations on both sides not towards oblivion but the overcoming of nationalist resentments and 20th-century ideologies with a perspective of European identity. Written with a divulgative intent and the flair of a journalist rather than the rigor of a historian (the bibliography would deserve further exploration of Slovene-Croatian sources), it is a very useful book: to understand, remember, and (try to) move beyond.