Fifty years after a treaty to draw the border between Italy and Yugoslavia, a local newspaper investigates
Translator was recently in northeastern Italy in the town of Gorizia – fifty kilometres north of the Adriatic port city of Trieste – and used the opportunity to pick up the local newspaper, Il Piccolo, from a street vendor. The Sunday edition included a pull-out section on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1975 Treaty of Osimo which finalised – decades after the end of the Second World War – the border between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia. (Gorizia itself is a town of two halves – the Italian Gorizia, and the Slovene Nova Gorica).
Drawing on memories of those involved in making the treaty, and those who experienced the formalisation of the border as a kind of partition, a series of articles in Il Piccolo shine a light on a micro-history of the Cold War, which has shaped local identity and feeling down to today in the area around Trieste.
“Osimo was a humiliation for the exiles”, Renzo Codarin tells Il Piccolo. Seventeen at the time, the Osimo treaty became the impetus for Codarin’s later political career. As a member of the Italian-speaking community of Istria – which became formalised as part of Yugoslavia through the treaty – he and his family felt they had been let down. “Italy should not have done this to me”, he remembered his grandmother telling him. One of the articles in the special shows a photo of graffiti stating simply: “No to Osimo”.
Miloš Budin, a member of the Slovenian-language minority in Italy sees a more positive side. “From Osimo the journey began to peaceful and constructive coexistence, both in the field of international relations and within the multi-ethnic society of Venezia Giulia.”
Up until the First World War Trieste and the surrounding area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its ethnically and linguistically mixed population was ruled from Vienna. When the old empire fell apart, Trieste and the surrounding areas became a flashpoint between Italian nationalists who claimed territory along the Adriatic, and the new state of Yugoslavia. At the end of the Second World War, the question of who owned what was still considered too difficult to solve permanently. Trieste and the surrounding areas were divided into different zones, under the UN Security Council.
The Cold War between the two halves of Europe, grew up and solidified around Trieste, now on a new geopolitical faultline, with local populations finding themselves cut off from land they considered theirs, old patterns of community disrupted even where trade (and a lot of smuggling) continued. Legally speaking, Italy and Yugoslavia retained claims on the same territory.
There were geopolitical concerns at stake in 1975. Raoul Pupo, a historian at the University of Trieste, writes in Il Piccolo about Italian fears in the 1960s about the situation in neighbouring Yugoslavia. “The prospects were bleak”, he writes. What if Yugoslavia were to collapse? Would Moscow intervene, risking a Third World War? “If a crisis exploded”, the historian notes, “an unresolved legal question would provide immense leverage to the Kremlin”. (The Soviet Union had, after all, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968).
Belgrade hoped to extend the “droit de regard” (essentially a right of oversight) of the Slovenian minority, contained in a memorandum in 1954, to other Italian provinces – thus effectively extending its say on policies in a wider border region. Italy couldn’t accept this because it might complicate the situation of the German speaking minority in Alto Adige (another part of Italy). Western powers hoped that if the border was settled, maybe Yugoslavia could have been brought closer to the West.
Looking back, a local priest is scathing of what happened in 1975. Church leaders spoke to the Italian Prime Minister several times ahead of the Osimo treaty, the newspaper reports, urging caution. “But Rome wanted to close the deal quickly”, Ettore Malnati, told Il Piccolo – ignoring a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the agreement to be revised. “It was a space in the face for democracy”, the priest says. Could things have been different? “It would have been enough to wait, as UN representatives suggested”.
Roberto Menia, a Senator for the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party goes further, calling Osimo a “betrayal”. Even fifty years on, the Senator says, he keeps at home an urn of earth from Istria: “the soil of my mother”. When Yugoslavia broke up, Slovenia and Croatia should, he says, have paid compensation of over a hundred million dollars to Italians no longer able to return to Istria: “we didn’t see a cent”.
There’s very little border control between Italy and Slovenia these days. Both countries are members of the European Union. Translator crossed several times, without difficulty, without a passport, without being asked a single question by Italian border police. But even long resolved border disputes carry a political charge.
Summary by CEM.
Original articles published in Italian in Il Piccolo on 9 November 2025 under the title Trattato di Osimo: La linea e la ferita
The articles are available online here and in the paper edition of the newspaper.
Il Piccolo is a local Italian-language newspaper in Gorizia and Trieste founded in 1881.
