Trieste 1954. Italian echoes of the “second redemption”

di Massimo Baioni
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 50 (2015), p. 115

In October 1954 Trieste returned to Italy, after 9 years of Anglo-American military government and hard politics and diplomatic conflicts with the new Yugoslavia of Tito. The “second redemption”, after the one of 1918, resulted in large public demonstrations, since the city, despite its complex ethnic reality, was identified in Italy as the memory of the Great War, the nation, the fatherland, the “italianità”. In the context of the cold war and of the new political situation of the Italian Republic, the article analyzes the representations and the languages of the political myth of Trieste and its presence in the national public memory. The popular press, the cine-newspapers Incom, the telegrams sent to the Prime Minister allow to explore some aspects of the public and private receipt of the image of Trieste: together with the persistence of sentimental factors that feed that image, it is also possible to see the signals of crisis of the patriotic myths along the changes that Italy would have lived in the years of the “great transformation”. Key words: Trieste, Italian Republic, Cold war, Patriotism, Public memory, Political Symbols