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INTRODUCTION
The
innocent traveller could be forgiven for assuming that Trieste and
the adjoining Italian provinces of Gorizia and Udine are totally
Italian in language and culture.
But as you leave the centre of Trieste and Gorizia towns behind, you are entering another linguistic universe - the hidden world of Slovene Trieste, buried under an absence of linguistic markers, though nowadays with a few bilingual signs to indicate that another people live here too. The entire north-east frontier of Italy is home to some 100,000 Slovenes out of a total Italian population of some 500,000. They are not a people that have flooded across the frontiers from Slovenia proper, it is rather that the frontiers have marooned them in an Italy that does not want to admit their existence and has often tried to wipw out their community. In Trieste province, the 49,000 Slovenes (out of an overall population of 300,000) have an unbroken tradition of settlement going back over more than a thousand years, whereas the Italians are much more recent arrivals. In Udine province this minority has few community rights, in Gorizia the situation is somewhat better, and in Trieste there is more than a hint of ethnic cleansing and mutual hatred, exploited politically by Right Wing political parties and the Italian Foreign Ministry in advancing its Balkan policies. In all three provinces the Italian authorities and large segments of the Italian community play down or deny their existence in various ways, referring to the Slovenes as "a people without a past" in spite of their long history. |
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