Constructing the Italian border. The First World War in the East of the country

Italy’s entrance into the First World War took place a year after the beginning of the conflict, with the attack of areas belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a State with which, until that time, Italy had been allied. Those areas coincided with the present border between Italy and Slovenia. The battles took place in in a thin strip of territory, on the one hand limiting the destruction, on the other provoking heavy consequences in the rears of the front which were occupied, when the front had moved up to the river Piave, by the Habsburg army. The end of the war brought to Italy ex-imperial provinces, where Hapsburg citizens had Italian, German, Slovenian and Croatian nationality. Those annexed provinces thus became a problem for Italy from economic, social and national point of view. The economic question was immediately resolved, investing the available funds only on the city of Trieste; the presence of “alloglotti”, people speaking other languages, was overcome through the progressive reduction of their national autonomies. In this regard, the use of war memory became central. All that had to deal with the Austro-Hungarian administration was removed and the memories of the dead under the imperial flag were also denied. At the same time the narrative concerning the territory was told privileging the exaltation of the Italian victory with the implicit underlining of the defeat of the inhabitants of the occupied territories. These choices were also functional to the affirmation of fascism, which spread, in the annexed Eastern provinces, before the rest of Italy and which applied its own ideology in opposition to the “foreign” in particular towards the Slovenes and Croats living there. This attitude did not end with the Second World War, won by Yugoslavia and lost by Italy, fueling a local opposition that maintained the national distinctions in the name of the Cold War. Thus, during the Twentieth century, the territory of the Eastern border became a sort of blackboard in which a series of signs were introduced - monuments, cemeteries, cities, toponyms, etc. – and, by exploiting the legacy of the First World War, those signs became functional to underline the division between the two parts.